GRACE
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GRACE
prime mover {motor primus), it is concluded that
every act and every movement of the thoroughly
contingent secondary causes (.causir sccimclir) or crea-
tures must emanate from the first cause, and that by
the application of their potentiality to the act. But
God, respecting the nature of things, moves necessary
agents to necessary, and free agents to free, activity —
including sin, except that God is the originator only of
its physical entity, not of its formal mahce. Inas-
much as the Divine influence precedes aU acts of the
creature, not in the order of time, but in that of cau-
sality, the motion emanating from God and seconded
by free intelligent agents takes on the character of a
physical premotion (/.riFmolio physica) of the free
acts, which may also be called a physical predeter-
mination (pnrdeterminalio physica), because the free
determination of the will is accomplished only by
virtue of the divine predetermination.
In this premotion or predetermination is also found the medium of the Divine knowledge by which God's omniscience foresees infallibly all the future acts, whether absolute or conditional, of intelligent crea- tures, and which explains away at once the undemon- strable and imaginary scientia media of the Molinists. For just as certainly as God in His predetermined de- crees knows His own will, so certainly does He know all the necessarily included determinations of the free will of creatures, be they of absolute or conditional futurity. Now if we carry these philosophical princi- ples from the domain of the natural to the supernat- ural, then efficacious grace {gralia efficax) must be re- garded as a physical premotion of the supernaturally equipped will to the performance of a good act, for rev- elation undeniably refers back to grace not only the possibiUty, but also the willing and the actual per- formance of a good act. But the will predetermined to this free good act must with a metaphysical cer- tainty correspond with grace, for it would be a contra- diction to assert that the coiisensus, brought about by efficacious grace, can at the same time be an actual dissensus. This historical necessity (necessilas conse- quentice), involved in every act of freedom and distin- guishable from the compelling necessity (necessitas consequentis), does not destroy the freedom of the act.
For although it be true that a man who is freely sit- ting cannot at the same time be standing (_sensus com- positus), nevertheless his freedom in sitting is main- tained by the fact that he might be standing instead of sitting (sensus dinsus). So it remains true that grace is not efficacious because the free will consents, but conversely the free will consents because grace efficaciously premoves it to the wilhng and perform- ing of a good act. Hence gratia efficax is intrinsically and by its nature (ab intrinseco s. per se) efficacious, and consequently intrinsically and essentially differ- ent from sufficient grace (gratia sufficiens), which imparts only the posse, not the agere. To make merely si/fficient grace efficacious a new supplementary grace must needs be supplied. How then is such a grace really sufficient (gratia vere sufficiens)? To this most of the Thomists reply: If the free will did not resist the grace offered, God would not hesitate to sup- ply the efficacious grace so that the failure of the grace is to be referred to the sinful resistance of the free will (cf. Limbourg, S.J., " Selbstzpichnimg der thomisti- .schenGnadenlehre"in"Zeitschrift ftir kathol. Theol- ogie", Innsbruck, 1877).
A survey of the strictly regulated uniformity of this system, of the relentless and logical sequence of the idea of the causa prima and motor primus in every nat- ural and supernatural activity of creatures, and lastly of the lofty and resolute defence of the inalienable right of grace to be considered the chief factor in the affair of salvation, must instil into the minds of im- partial and dispassionate students a deep respect for the Thomistic system. Nevertheless the Molinists claim that there are certain gaps and crevices in this
majestic structure, and, by inserting levers of criti-
cism in these, llicy believe they can shake the founda-
tions (if I he eiiilice and enconijiass its downfall. We
shall here ednline (lur.selves to the four greatest objec-
tions wliieli Miilinisni marshals against Thomism.
The first objection is the danger that in the Thomis- tic system the freedom of the will cannot be main- tained as against efficacious grace, a difficulty which by the way is not unperceived by the Thomists them- selves. For since the essence of freedom does not lie in the contingency of the act nor in the merely passive indifference of the will, but rather in its active indif- ference — to will or not to will, to will this and not that — so it appears impossible to reconcile the physi- cal predetermination of a particular act by an alien wiU and the active spontaneousness of the determina- tion by the will itself; nay more, they seem to exclude each other as utterly as do determinism and indeter- minism, necessity and freedom. The Thomists an- swer tliis olijection by making a distinction between seiisiis cDiiiiiiisilus and sensus dii'isus, but the Molinists insist that this distinction is not correctly applicable here. For just as a man who is bound to a chair can- not be said to be sitting freely as long as his ability to stand is thwarted by indissoluble cords, so the will predetermined by efficacious grace to a certain thing cannot be said to retain the power to dissent, espe- cially since the will, predetermined to this or that act, has not the option to receive or disregard the premo- tion, since this depends simply and solely on the will of God. And does not the Council of Trent (Sess. VI, cap. v, can. iv) describe efficacious grace as a grace which man "can reject", and from which he "can dis- sent"? Consequently, the very same grace, which de facto is efficacious, might imder other circumstances be inefficacious. Herein the second objection to the Thomistic distinction between gratia efficax and gralia sufficiens is already indicated. If both graces are in their nature and intrinsically different, it is difficult to see how a grace can be really sufficient which requires another grace to complete it. Hence, it would ap- pear that the Thomistic gratia sufficiens is in reality a gratia insufficiens. The Thomists cannot well refer the inefficacy of this grace to the resistance of the free will, for this act of resistance must be traced to a prce- motio physica as inevitable as the efficacious grace.
Moreover a third great difficulty lies in the fact that sin, as an act, demands the predetermining activity of the "first mover", so that God would according to this system appear to be the originator of sinful acts. The Thomistic distinction between the entity of sin and its malice offers no solution of the difficulty. For since the Divine influence itself, which premoves ad utium, both introduces physically the sin as an act and entity, and also, by the simultaneous withholding of the opposite premotion to a good act, makes the sin itself an inescapable fatality, it is not easy to explain why sin cannot be traced back to God as the origina- tor. Furthermore, most sinners commit their mis- deeds, not with a regard to the depravity, but for the sake of the physical entity of the acts, so that ethics must, together with the wickedness, condemn the phys- ical entity of sin. The Molinists deny {hat this ob- jection affects their own system, when they postulate the concursus of God in the sinful act, and help them- selves out of the dilemma by drawing the distinction between the entity and malice of sin. They say that the Divine co-operation is a concursus simullaneus, which employs the co-operating arm of God only after the will by its own free determination has decided upon the commission of the sinful act, whereas the Tho- mistic co-operation is essentially a concursus prcevius which as an inevitable physical premotion predeter- mines the act regardless of the fact whether the hu- man will can resist or not. From this consideration arises the fourth and last objection to the claim of the Thomists, that they have only apparently found in
