Disputations doesn't like Molina

Disputations notes the small brouhaha that's been going on about the viability of the Society of Jesus in the Church today. His unwillingness to concede the opprobrium is fair and appreciated. It may be that, particularly outside some better provinces like the Eastern P. or Toulouse, the Dominicans also share some of the same problems, although I would say that they may be generically the same (1960s-70s confusion), but specifically less chronic and intense.

But, ah ha! The real enemy emerges: Those Jesuitical defenses of human freedom from the late 16th and 17th centuries. For readers who are unaware, the Catholic Encyclopedia offers a summary here. In brief: In the late sixteenth century, the Dominican and Jesuit orders came to fisticuffs, in a epic disagreement which eventually took a Papal prohibition to end the debate, and where accusations of heresy were thrown around left and right. The Council of Trent, in order to defend the integrity of human nature against Luther, Calvin, and others, gave a strong defense of human freedom, and took a liberal stance on God's offering of grace. Basically: God offers salvation and grace to everyone, and even after original sin man is free to choose to love God, and is not determined to evil. The statements were indeed the result of the compromise of a Council, where many theologians with many different opinions collaberated. After Trent, the Jesuits, still a very young order, saw the teachings of Trent as quite congruent with the Spiritual Exercises and their own understanding of grace and freedom, which primarily emphasized the total response that a person must make to what God is offering in grace. In 1588 a Jesuit, Molina, published a commentary on part of the Summa, where he offered an innovative premise of "Middle Knowledge" to try to resolve some tensions between St. Thomas and the new emphases of Trent. The Dominicans saw this as an intrusion of a false understanding of freedom, and misunderstanding of God's knowledge and the logical implications of it concerning predestination, etc. A Spanish Dominican, Banez, offered a defense of St. Thomas in light of the new tensions by positing a kind of "premotion" that would move creatures to their appropriate responses, so as to protect the omnipotence of God.

The theology here gets quite complicated, so I'll skip most of it.

But the argument got so fierce that the Pope Clement VIII started a commision "De Auxilii" to resolve the debate. The commision was unable to do that, although it nearly came down against the Jesuits several times. Eventually Pope Paul V (1607) ended the Commision and told both orders that they should stop condemning each other, that both theories could be taught, and to get his permission for further debates. The Jesuits and Dominicans kept on fighting nonetheless, and still do to this day (although less acrimoniously).

This debate centered around things like predestination, sufficient and efficacious grace, Divine foreknowledge, etc. The Jesuits (actually the Molinists, as there were other theories presented by other Jesuits, e.g. Bellarmine and Suarez) are called congruists because Molina compared the working of Divine and human freedom to a kind of co-operation or concurrence, like both God and man pull the barge down the Eire Canal at the same time. The Dominicans rightly objected to this; in fact, Molina's understanding of freedom owed more to Duns Scotus it seems than St. Thomas. (Too bad they didn't really understand Thomas's teaching either.) For Thomas, any act of human freedom is all God. God moves some things like humans according to their natures, that is, in a non-determined way. Some might confuse this for predeterminism, but the Dominicans said that God used a kind of created motion to infallibly will how man would choose. So antecedently, God might offer grace to all men, but by means of physical pre-motion, only efficaciously give it to some. This has roots in St. Thomas's understanding of reprobation, where if someone goes to Hell, it is basically because God gave them less help. He in fact only willed them the good of punishment, not of salvation. (This sounds bad, but not as bad as when you read the previous questions in the Summa first; see here.)

The Jesuits wanted to preserve a stronger sense of God's universal offer of salvation, as well as a greater power to human freedom than they saw in the Dominican interpretation. So they held that God can use all sorts of graces that will effect the situation of man choosing to go along with grace or not, graces "congruent" with the free will of man. This seems to put the difference between sufficient and efficient/efficacious grace in man who wills to cooperate or not. The Dominicans held strongly that it is God who determines the difference not man, and their theory of physical pre-motion a way to still claim that the will was free and God yet infallible in his Providence.

So a pretty huge debate. Jesuits and Dominicans today will still gloss over it, saying that the argument reflects either Jesuit voluntarism or Dominican Jansenism, respectively.

Actually, the Church's condemnations of Jansenism, later on, were resented by the Dominicans, who saw them as theologically imprecise: such as, Christ dies for all men not just the predestined (contradicting Thomas who states several times in the Summa that Christ only prays for the predestined in his Passion), and that interior grace is never irresistible. The Jesuits of course, liked these later Papal teachings.

Regardless, most Dominicans and Jesuits held the entrenched positions well into the 20th century. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange was a famous defender of traditional Banezianism, and Carlo Boyer, of Molinism.

For myself, I think both sides have serious errors, and neither understands St. Thomas where it counts here. The key is to understand the real relationship between God and creation, and what creation really is; and to realize freedom is only for the good, and that the will is already determined in its operation to its end, universal good, and is also a passive and active power, like the intellect (freedom of specification AND freedom of exercise). Read Thomas's De Malo question 6.

However, in 1941 Bernard Lonergan wrote his dissertation on Operative grace in St. Thomas at the Gregorian, and in one fell swoop, dispatched both Molinism and Banezianism as fallacious. He later published a summary of this in a series of articles for Theological Studies. Here is the work.

The two best theologians today on this matter, who have also rejected the solutions of Banez and Molina, are David Burrell, CSC, and Brian Shanley, OP. They are both indebted to Lonergan's understanding and breakthrough. Burrell in particular has written much on this. Here for example, in a review.

I'll try to blog some more on this later.

"As a man, priest, and religious Molina commanded the respect and esteem of his bitterest adversaries. During his whole life his virtues were a source of edification to all who knew him. To prompt obedience he joined true and sincere humility. On his death-bed, having been asked what he wished done with his writings, he answered in all simplicity: "The Society of Jesus may do with them what it wishes". His love for evangelical poverty was most remarkable; in spite of his bodily infirmity brought on by overwork, he never sought any mitigation in that matter of either clothing or food. He was a man of great mortification to the very end of his life."