Summa Theologiae I-II, Q112, a2, and SCG III 160-162
 
Is preparation for grace required on man’s part? This is one of the rare articles in which Thomas answers both Yes and No. Grace can be understood in either of two ways: as the habitual gift of God (i.e., the infused virtues of faith, hope, and charity) or as supernatural help from God in general—i.e., any movement of the human soul toward the good. For grace in the first sense, some preparation is required, since the “forms” of the supernatural virtues can only come into “matter” that is suitably prepared for them. Thomas has in mind some act of consent on the part of the human being toward receiving grace, since God does not infuse the supernatural virtues into someone against his will.

In the second sense, no preparation is possible, since no movement of the soul toward God can occur without God’s help. Even the act of free-will by which we consent to the reception of the supernatural virtues is something worked in us by God.
 
Article 3. Is grace necessarily given to everyone who prepares for it?

Yes, but only because of God’s infallible concordance with His own decrees. Thomas considers an argument (in objection 3) based on Dionysius’s principle that good is naturally self-diffusive. Since grace is a higher good than any good of nature, it should be supremely self-diffusive, and so it should “automatically” flow into anyone whose heart is suitably prepared for it. In response, Thomas points out that the diffusion of good requires the action of an agent—a suitably prepared piece of matter is not automatically elevated to a higher state. And, since God is the agent and God acts freely in creating, the diffusion of grace depends on His free decrees. The self-diffusiveness of good does not require that God give every good to every possible creature.
 
Article 4: Is grace greater in one than in another?
 
Grace can be measured in two ways: in terms of the good to which it directs us, and in terms of the degree to which we receive the influence of the direction (subjectively). All grace is equal in the first sense, since it orders all to the supreme good of the beatific vision. In the second respect, grace can vary from person to person. The better one has prepared oneself for grace, the greater its influence in one’s life. But this too depends on the degree to which we are helped by God to prepare ourselves for grace. Hence, the fundamental source of inequality lies in God’s free choice.

​Summa Theologiae I, Q23, and SCG III.163
 
It is only the elect who are predestined, and they are predestined only for their ultimate end, the beatific vision. Thomas takes the term ‘predestine’ to refer to God’s aiding and directing men to their supernatural end, an end that they cannot achieve by their natural powers alone. Predestination then is simply one aspect of God’s providential care of all things. In reply 3, Thomas clarifies that predestination applies both to elect men and to elect angels, since in both cases the ultimate end exceeds their natural powers.
 
In article 2, Thomas explains that predestination exists in an active way in the mind of God. There is no quality of predestination in the elect. The predestination of the elect consists simply in the fact that they have been chosen for eternal life by God. The execution of predestination occurs through the government of God, which consists in a kind of calling and justifying of the elect by God (Romans 8:30).
 
The opposite of predestination is reprobation (article 3). God is said to reprobate those who are not elect. Reprobation is an instance of God’s permissive will, and an aspect of His providence. God permits some men to fall away from their final end. This reprobation is not mere foreknowledge—it is an aspect of God’s will, “the will to permit (voluntatem permittendi) a person to fall into sin, and to impose the punishment of damnation on account of that sin.”
 
Reply to objection 1: “God loves all men and all creatures, inasmuch as He wishes them all some good; but He does not wish (vult – volo seems to imply a wanting that is somewhat stronger than a mere “wish”) every good to them all. So far, therefore, as He does not wish this particular good—namely eternal life—He is said to hate or reprobate them.”
 
At the same time, Thomas insists (in reply 2) that reprobation is not the cause of sin, as predestination is the cause of grace. “Guilt proceeds from the free-will of the person who is reprobated and deserted by grace.”
 
In objection 3, Thomas considers the question of whether the reprobate are unable to obtain grace. Thomas insists that any such impossibility is not absolute, but only conditional or suppositional. Such conditional necessity does not do away with the liberty of choice. This conditional or suppositional necessity refers only to the immutability of God in His eternal knowledge and will—it means only that each future fact necessitates itself, in the sense that it is necessary that if it will be, it will be.
 
In article 4, Thomas explains that predestination is moved by love for the person and preceded causally by God’s choosing to give them eternal life. It is not a mere knowledge of something independent of God’s will. This point is clarified still further in article 5: predestination does not consist in God’s foreknowledge of the merits of the elect. That is, I am not predestined because God foreknew that I would freely cooperate with God’s grace. The causal relation goes in the opposite direction: I freely cooperate with God’s grace because He elected and predestined me.
 
Thomas takes it as obvious that predestination as a choice existing in God could not be caused by some external factor, like our choices. Nonetheless, we can look for a causal or explanatory order among the things that are willed by God. Consequently, we can ask whether God willed that p because He willed that q, or vice versa, or God willed neither because of the other.  So, we can sensibly ask whether God willed our predestination because He willed our future cooperation, or vice versa.
 
Thomas thinks that those who suppose that predestination follows from cooperation rely on a false dichotomy between grace and free-will, as though what we do by grace we cannot do freely, and vice versa. On this picture, God supplies equal grace to everyone, and then we, totally apart from grace, decide whether to cooperate with it or not. If we decide to cooperate, then God predestines us. Thomas thinks this is based on a false premise. Free cooperation with grace is itself a manifestation of grace. Therefore, predestination causes the future grace, which causes the free cooperation. That which is through (est per) free-will is also of (ex) predestination.
 
Whatever is in a man disposing him toward salvation, even our preparation for grace, is included under the effect of predestination. Lamentations 5:20, “Convert us, O Lord, to Thee, and we shall be converted.”
 
Why then are some predestined and others reprobated? (Objection 3) The reason must be sought in the goodness of God. The completion of the universe, as an expression of God’s glory, requires a variety of grades of being. (Romans 9:22, 23 and II Timothy 2:20) God would be acting unjustly if He owed predestination to all of us as a debt, but instead He gives eternal life gratuitously. He is free to give more or less, as He chooses. (Matthew 20:14, 15)
 
Does predestination take away our choice, making our salvation or damnation necessary, pre-determined? Thomas denies this in article 6, for reasons already given in relation to God’s providence in general. Predestination is an aspect of God’s providence, and His providence does not impose necessity on events. He works through secondary causes, and the working of these causes remains contingent and undetermined. Here Thomas could have appealed to Boethius’s insight: that God is outside of time, and so He cannot properly be said to “fore”-know or “pre”-destine things. He knows and wills from eternity, and eternally His willing and knowing my present and future choices is fully compatible with those choices remaining contingent until I have actually made them. My will is free and undetermined because God’s will is free and undetermined, and God wills what I shall will through my exercise of my own free will.
 
As I argued above, the viability of this answer depends on denying that God has a single, fully unified plan for creation that was in place at the first moment. If God has multiple plans that go into effect at different points in time, it makes sense to ask when someone has become elect or reprobate (i.e., when the plan of God’s that aims or fails to aim at their salvation has come into effect). Clearly, we are all elect (or reprobate) at some point before the last moment of our earthly lives, but how far in advance? I think it may vary from person to person. Once someone is elected, their salvation is no longer contingent (and so no longer up to them). This does not mean that we can know that we are elect before our earthly lives are over: this is impossible, barring some special, private revelation.
 
In Ephesians 1:4, St. Paul writes, “Before the foundation of the world He chose us in Christ to be His people… and He predestined us to be adopted as His children through Jesus Christ.” This does suggest that each elect person was elected from the moment of the world’s creation. However, as Karl Barth pointed out, it is not clear whether Paul is talking here about our individual election or about the collective election of the Church, Christ’s body. The emphasis on “in Christ” and “through Jesus Christ” supports the latter interpretation somewhat. I think that it is possible for our individual election to occur within time, even after our lives have largely unfolded.
 
Once we are elected, our salvation would seem to be no longer contingent and so no longer up to us. However, this does not mean that we would not still have a very great scope of freedom. The degree of glory we will eventually receive might still remain largely contingent.
 
All of this is compatible with God’s having (in eternity) certain and infallible knowledge of the whole course of history in a single, unified act of vision.
 
In article 7, Thomas affirms that the number of the elect is certain. That is, God does not leave the division of elect and reprobate up to chance. The distribution of salvation and damnation serves the good of the creation as a whole. This depends, I think, on St. Thomas’s assumption of a single, unified plan for all of history.
 
In a similar way, for St. Thomas, it was not a matter of chance that Jesus and Mary remained sinless in their earthly lives, but it was nonetheless a matter of their own free choice that they did so. The Blessed Virgin represents the hardest case for a van-Inwagen-style analysis of freedom. Her perfect sinlessness was certainly fixed by God’s plan at the very moment of her conception, if not much earlier. It would seem then that her refraining from sin was never contingent at any moment of her life. How then could she be said to refrain from sinning freely? St. Thomas would reply that her free choices were never pre-determined by any creaturely conditions, but only by God’s sovereign election. Perhaps I could argue that the Blessed Virgin’s sinlessness was always supremely fitting but not (at least not at first) strictly entailed by God’s initial plans for her. He gave her sufficient grace to avoid sin at each point in her life, but it remained for a long time contingent whether or not He would do so. Once again, this is not to call into question whether her sinlessness was grasped eternally by God’s perfect omniscience in a single act of knowing and willing.
 
Jesus, I think, may be a special case. As the Incarnation of God, Jesus enjoys the per se freedom of the divine nature, in the sense that nothing could determine that nature to be what it is or to do what it does. Hence, Jesus’ freedom would be compatible with the complete necessity of His sinlessness.

 
Summa Theologiae I, Q22, and SCG III.71-74
 
God’s providence means that God is intelligently ordering all things toward their ultimate end. To do this, it is not sufficient that He simply create things—He must also order their interactions. Since God is the cause of the whole creation, He necessarily moves the whole creation to its ultimate end, which consists in good overall order.
 
Agents order their actions to some ends. Since God’s action extends all the way to every detail of creation, every such detail must be ordered to God’s ends. God’s knowledge and agency extend to particular things, and not just to general kinds of things. And, as we saw last time, His agency always produces definite effects.
 
In reply to objection 1 of article 2, Thomas embraces the radical conclusion that there is nothing that happens by chance in relation to God, since all the eventualities are foreseen by God. It seems to me that this moves too fast. It is true that all coincidences are foreseen by God, but it doesn’t seem to follow that they cannot happen by chance. If a coincidence is the result of God’s moving two or more things toward distinct ends, and neither of the ends entails the coincidence, then it seems that we could call the coincidence a matter of chance, even if God foresees that it would happen. God can foresee something as happening without intending it either as a means or an end.
 
In his reply to objection 2 in the same article, Thomas argues that God permits all of the defects in creation for the sake of some good of the universe as a whole. For example, lions would cease to exist if there were no slaying of animals. I don’t think that this entails (or is meant to entail) that this is the best of all possible worlds—merely that there must be some reason for the existence of all of the privations within creation. As Augustine said, God is able to bring (some) good from evil, but it doesn’t follow that each evil is necessary in order to maximize total goodness.
 
I question whether Thomas has established that there is such a thing as the “good of the universe.” The universe, or the totality of creation, is not a single substance. Consequently, we can’t be sure that it has its own final cause or natural end. Created things have a common end – which is God’s glory, the manifestation of His self-diffusive goodness, but that doesn’t imply that they collectively have a single end, as Thomas seems to assume.
 
There are three plausible candidates for a global good or end: justice in the distribution of benefits, the variety of modes of participating in God, and the overall beauty of the universe. On the first point, it seems plausible to think that things must already form a unity or a system of some kind, before the question of justice can even arise. If there are rational animals in the Andromeda galaxy, for example, does it make sense to ask whether God has exercised distributive justice in giving goods to them and to us? Can we ask whether God has exercised distributive justice between me and a vein of coal in Pennsylvania? On the second point, I’m not sure that variety as such is a good. It seems to like the finitude and definition that is generally required of goods—there is no maximum degree of variety that the world could contain. Perhaps it is better to say that God created each kind of thing simply because it is good for such things to exist, with variety as a mere by-product. And in the case of beauty, it seems that something must possess a certain kind of unity in order to count as beautiful. I will grant that a plurality of substances can be collectively beautiful, like the stars in the earth’s sky, but there must be at least a unified standpoint from which the collective can be considered, and I’m not sure that there is such a thing with respect to the universe as a whole.
 
The question of whether the universe as a whole has its own end or value is important. Thomas infers that God’s providence consists in a kind of unified plan or blueprint for the entire cosmos, rather than a library of plans or intentions for each substance and unified system of substances. One might respond: if God has multiple plans or intentions, must He not coordinate them, to avoid internal conflict in His intentions? Yes, but coordination isn’t the same thing as consolidation. We can imagine, I think, a plurality of divine plans existing in a degree of mutual contingency and independence from one another.
 
If God has a single, unified plan for creation, then it must have been in effect from the very first moment of creation. Since God’s plan is necessarily effective, and if (as St. Thomas teaches) the plan is complete in every detail, it is hard to see how this can be compatible with genuine contingency in the future. In contrast, if God has multiple, mutually compatible plans, then there is no reason that such plans could not come “on line” at different points in history. Such a plan goes into effect as soon as its earliest elements are actualized, but not before that point. Prior to actualization, the plan would be contingent relative to the events so far realized. Of course, all the plans are equally in effect from the perspective of God’s eternity, but that should be compatible with a changing status relative to the progress of time.
 
William of Ockham introduced a useful distinction concerning future facts. Some of these are hard facts and others are soft. So, for example, let’s suppose that it is genuinely a matter of contingency whether the Astros win their pennant this year. Let’s suppose that in fact they won’t. Then the truth of the statement ‘The Astros won’t win the pennant in 2021’ is a soft fact about the future. In contrast, let’s suppose that God has determined that one day the Anti-Christ will emerge. Then the truth of the statement ‘The Anti-Christ will emerge’ is a hard fact about the future. All facts about the present and past are now hard facts. So, it is now a hard fact that dinosaurs once lived or that the Astros won the 2017 World Series. Similarly, Ockham argues, facts about God’s will and knowledge concerning the future can be either hard or soft. As time passes, some of these facts harden. This does not involve any real change in God, since His act of will and knowledge is not internally modified by their objects.
 
In the reply to objection 4, Thomas considers the problem of reconciling human freedom with divine providence. He argues that human freedom consists in the fact that human beings are not naturally determined to a unique course of action in each circumstance. This lack of determinism applies only within the created order—it does not exclude God’s unique mode of causality (primary causation). “Everything happening from the exercise of human freedom must be subject to divine providence.” God’s providence extends in a “more excellent way” to the just than to the wicked. He can be said to have “abandoned” (dimittere) them, although they are not altogether excluded from His Providence, since that would mean their annihilation.
 
Reply 5: “Since a rational creature has, through its free will, control (dominium) over its actions, it is subject to divine providence in an especial manner (speciali modo).” I think this means that God’s agency does not exclude our own “control” or dominion over our actions. Instead, as I suggested before, we exercise a kind of joint dominion, neither excluding the other. When we do wrong, this is imputed to us and not to God as fault, because of the difference in our respective intentions. Compare Genesis 50:20 (Joseph to his brothers): “But as for you, you meant evil against me [by selling me to the Egyptians], but God meant it for good, in order to bring it about as it is this day, to save many people alive.”
 
In article 4, Thomas explains that at times God governs the creation through intermediaries. This reflects God’s strength and not His weakness. It is not that He needs such intermediate causes, but that He further enhances the glory of His creation by bestowing on creatures the dignity of real causality.
 
The role of secondary causes in explaining evil is explained by Thomas in SCG I, chapter 71. A defect that is produced by some secondary or instrumental cause is not always attributed to the primary cause. Think of a skilled artisan using a flawed tool.
 
But isn’t God responsible for any defect in His secondary agents? No, because all creatures are necessarily “defective” or imperfect in some respect. No rational creature, for example, can take into account every possibly relevant factor. Moreover, the excellence of creation requires that creatures exist at a variety of levels or grades of excellence.
 
The goodness of God’s government of creation requires that He allow things to work according to their own, limited nature. Otherwise, creation would be a kind of sham, a world of mere shadow-boxing.
 
It is interesting that Thomas never appeals in these articles (as far I can tell) to God’s timelessness, in the way that Boethius does in The Consolation of Philosophy. Neither does Thomas bring to bear the implications of his strong doctrine of creation—namely, the fact that the content of God’s will and knowledge are extrinsic to His own being. He does insist that God’s causality of future things does not take away their real contingency in the circumstances, but he does seem to think that future contingencies are already in some way certain and immutably fixed. However, I don’t think that this follows. From our point of view, within the flow of time, future events are really and not just apparently contingent and indeterminate. It is true that for God (in eternity) all things happen “at once”, past, present, and future, but that does not contradict that fact that at the present time the past is fixed and the future is largely “open”. If a future event is really now contingent, then so is God’s eternal knowledge and will with respect to that event. As time passes, God’s will gradually shifts (in its objects) from contingency to necessity, but this is merely a Cambridge change in God, with no intrinsic modification required.
 
God can make certain future events necessary, by promising them to us or by inspiring prophets with infallible foreknowledge of them. So, for example, Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denials were fixed in advance by prophecy, as was Cyrus’s decree to allow the Jews to return to Canaan. Similarly, the future advent of the Anti-Christ, and the Second Coming of Christ are fixed and certain. But much of the future is genuinely open to alternatives, depending on our choices and chance events.
 
To clarify this point, let’s look at Peter van Inwagen’s consequence argument for the incompatibility of free will and determinism. I will modify van Inwagen’s argument to make it apply to God’s Providence, conceived of as a fixed and comprehensive plan for the future.
 
1.God has (in eternity) a Plan according to which I will do x tomorrow (where x is some arbitrary free action of mine).
2.It’s not currently up to me whether God has such a plan.
3.Necessarily, if God has such a Plan, then I will do x tomorrow. (God’s providence is infallibly effective).
4.Therefore, it’s not currently up to me whether I will do x tomorrow. (By 1-3 and van Inwagen’s transfer principle)
 
I think we should deny that premise 2 is generally true. Whether I do x tomorrow can be both up to me and up to God, and there is no determinate divine Plan already in effect that settles the matter one way or the other. To think that God has to plan ahead in order to govern the creation with coherent providence is to be guilty of a kind of anthropomorphism. God is infinite in wisdom, and so He can do whatever “planning” is needed on the fly, so to speak.
 
Presumably, God has some plans about creation that are not currently up to me. For example, His eternal plans about what happened in the past are currently beyond my control. Let Plan-Minus stand for the sum total of God’s plans that are currently beyond my control. Here’s another version of the consequence argument:
 
1.It’s not currently up to me what God’s Plan-Minus contains. (By definition of Plan-Minus)
2.Necessarily, if God has Plan-Minus, then His comprehensive Plan for all of history must include my doing x tomorrow. (Any initial segment of God’s Plan entails all of its successive elements.)
3.Necessarily, if God’s comprehensive Plan for all of history includes my doing x tomorrow, then I will do x tomorrow. (God’s providence is infallibly effective).
4.Therefore, it’s not currently up to me whether I will do x tomorrow. (By 1-3 and van Inwagen’s transfer principle)
 
Once again, I think we should deny 2. This is where it is crucial to determine whether God has simply a single Plan, each part of which requires all of the other parts, or whether God has multiple partial plans that are mutually contingent. If the latter, then we can ask when a particular partial plan has become the external object of God’s will. We can ask, for example, when a particular person became elect or reprobate, and we can ask what contingent events contributed to this fact.