I. To the Question

4. To this question.

‘Predestination’ properly states an act of the divine will, namely ordination by the divine will of a choice of some intellectual or rational creature for grace and glory, although it can be taken for the act of intellect concomitant with that choice. Therefore, as has been said in general about liberty and contingency in the divine will with respect to certain special secondary objects [see preceding interpolation for dd. 38-39], so should one say with respect to this secondary object, that is ‘to will for this person grace and glory’.

5. And from this I say (because of what was said in the preceding question [sc. the preceding interpolation]) that God contingently predestines him whom he has predestined, and he is able not to predestine him, - not both at the same time or successively, but each divisively, in the instant of eternity.

6. I say likewise to the question in itself, that he who is predestined could be damned; for his will is not confirmed because of his predestination, - and thus he can sin, and thus by parity of reason he can stand finally in sin and so be justly damned; but just as he is able to be damned so he is able not to be predestined.

7. But as to the logic of the proposed proposition, one must distinguish it according to composition and division; and in the composite sense the per se extreme is a man or person predestined, under the determination ‘predestined’, - and this sense is false; and in the divided sense too there are two categoricals, and of a person able to be beatified is asserted in one categorical ‘to be predestined’ and in the other ‘able to be damned’, - and these two are true of the same subject. They are not for this reason true, that opposites can be simultaneous, nor even because one can succeed the other (because each exists in eternity), but they are true simultaneously insofar as the divine volition is considered as naturally prior to its passage over this object, which is ‘glory for this person’; in that prior stage there is naturally no repugnance for the divine will to be of the opposite object, nay, it could be of the opposite equally, though not of both simultaneously.