Status Updates From Predestination: The Meaning...

“…even as the defect of limping is reduced to a crooked leg as its cause, but not to the motive power, which nevertheless causes whatever movement there is in the limping.” St Thomas is still undefeated

“Is there anything more absurd than to say that the will is not free in its act, because God efficaciously wills it to be free?” I gotta read Bossuet next (at some point)—his quotes in this book have been my favorite.

Nearing the end. “For God, unless men be themselves wanting to His grace, as He began the good work, so will He perfect it.” I should, by all available evidence, be able to finish the last 31 pages of this book soon.

Lightbulb day. Big day.

On predestination, I think that’s about it. Really great stuff. The “last chapter” of this section is a wonderful explanation for why we bring our learning right up to the edge of what we can know or take opinions on. Obviously, it’s for deepening faith. But the lengthy quotes from Bossuet can stand on their own and are worth their own read. (Happy to send them; too much work now to figure out the cite.)

Like turtles, it’s grace all the way down.

Molinism bad.

Sucks too because I kinda thought that’s how things could work when just thinking about it by myself. The lesson here is to read first, think later; you’ll almost certainly be wrong, because others have thought what you thought before you. Nothing new under the sun.

Head hurt. Scientia media seems like a compelling idea, but getting the causal arrow backwards is a big problem. (That is, God still has to cause the conditionals that he knows in advance; it’s not that they exist in advance, and he sees them independently of causing them, then acts according to the conditional to produce ends he wants.)

Unfortunate.

That God can cause us to freely choose the good is probably the hardest concept to grasp so far. Fr. GL’s explanation (of St Thomas’s explanation) of first and secondary causes is indispensable—much to chew on. Seems to me that equivocating “cause” as it is used in the natural sciences to “cause” as it’s used elsewhere (like in the law) helps square some circles. We’ll see!

Well, I know a couple important things. Many (many) glosses on those couple of things. Uncertain if I’m supposed to be tracking subtle differences across theologians, or if Fr GL is just laying down an extensive track record of the continuity of thought. Will report back.

As Richard Feynman apparently stated about QM, “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics,” the same may well be true for predestination.

Science struggles to synthesize paradoxical truths (quantum superposition, light acting as a wave and particle simultaneously), just as theologians do with predestination (God elects us to salvation, yet we have free will”.

“St John of the Cross says that in the passive purifications of the soul, in which, as a rule, the mystery of predestination appears in all its transcendent obscurity, the soul that has gone through this ordeal may feel the necessity of rising above all human conceptions with their apparent clarity, and thus abandon itself completely to God…”