1. Prédestination, grâce et libre arbitre, tentative de synthèse personnelle (II).
- Author
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Valuet, Basile
- Subjects
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AFTERLIFE , *SIN , *WILL of God , *CAUSATION (Philosophy) , *GOAL (Psychology) , *SOUL , *GIFT giving , *VIRTUES - Abstract
The author attempts to collect the best of Saint Thomas' position, to discern its limits and to propound some explanations or improvements. The divine permissive will makes moral evil to be possible, but moral evil does not necessarily follow. When Saint Thomas says nothing resists God's will about a given effect in a precise instant of time, it is true only of the consequent will, which takes into account everything that will have occurred before that instant. So the will to give efficacious grace takes into consideration the previous non-resistance of man to sufficient grace, and the will to impart eternal life at a certain stage takes into account the life of merit led before. God does not want independently of any account of blameworthy actions that there be men to punish in order His justice be manifested. If God has permitted the sins of men, it was not in order to have people to damn. The act of predestining, and the entirety of its effects are independent of the acts of man, but on the other hand, predestination to a specific gift takes into account the prescience of human acts antecedent to that gift. The general plan about the salvation of a person uses a series of fallible means to reach its goal. The esse imparted by God to the effect of the secondary cause through that very cause is contracted by the essentia (either natural or intentional) of that cause. So, as far as premotions are concerned, only moral ones propose as object of choice a specification, and in a fallible way, whereas physical ones supply the passage from potency to the act of deliberating and choosing, i.e. its existence, and possibly in an infallible manner. The grace as motion is nothing else than the movement itself of the soul. If God is moving the created will to the exercise of such choice, it is not compatible with that hypothesis that the created freewill not be exerting that choice ; however, this by no means entails that, under the same efficient motion of God to the exerting of a choice about the same specification, the choice could not have been different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2019