Fortieth Distinction

Single Question. Whether a Predestined Person can be Damned

1. About the fortieth distinction I ask whether a predestined person can be damned.

That he cannot be:

Everything past is simply necessary, because - according to the Philosopher Ethics 6.2.1139b9-11 - “God is deprived of this alone, to make undone what has been done;” but the predestination of this predestined person has transitioned into the past, because God predestined him from eternity; therefore it is simply necessary. Therefore God cannot not predestinate him, and consequently he cannot be damned.

2. Further, if a predestined person could be damned, this would only be through his own act; therefore by an act of a created will an act of the divine will could be impeded, which is impossible

3. On the contrary:

If a predestined person cannot be damned, then no one need take care to observe the precepts and the counsels, because however he acts he will be saved, if he is predestined - and however he acted, if he is fore-known, he would be damned. The whole divine law then is set down in vain!

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.

II. To the Principal Arguments

8. To the first argument [n.1] I say that it proceeds from a false imagination, the understanding of which imagination helps to understand the truth of the proposed question; for if per impossibile we were to understand that God had still not determined his will to one of the two sides, but was as it were deliberating whether he wished to predestine this person or not, our intellect could well grasp that he would contingently predestine or not predestine him, as is plain in an act of our will; but because we always go back to an act of the divine will as if it were past, for that reason we do not as it were conceive the liberty in the divine will for an act that has as it were already been posited by the will. But this imagination is false; for the ‘now’ of eternity, in which the act exists, is always present; and so one must have an understanding of the divine will or its volition, as it is of this object, the way one would if per impossibile God were now to begin to have a will in this ‘now’, - and thus God can in the ‘now’ of eternity freely will what he wills, as if his will were not determined to anything.

9. Then I say to the form of the argument [n.1] that predestination of this sort does not transition into the past. For although it co-existed with the past, which has transitioned, yet it itself is not past, - but the other things are past which co-existed with it. Hence, as was said in distinction 9 n.17, verbs of diverse times when said of God - to the extent they most truly belong to him - do not signify parts of time measuring the act, but they co-signify the ‘now’ of eternity as if measuring the act insofar as it co-exists with those many parts of time; and so, for God it is the same thing to predestine, to have predestined, and to be about to predestine, and so one of these is as contingent as the other, because there is nothing save the ‘now’ of eternity measuring the act, - which is neither present nor past nor future, but co-existent with all of these.

10. To the second [n.2] I say that a created will cannot impede the ordination of the divine will, because there would be no ‘to impede’ unless the purpose of the divine will stood and the opposite came about through another will; but this is impossible, because just as a created will can merit damnation, so too can there concomitantly follow that the divine will would not pre-ordain it to glory. Hence it was said in the preceding distinction (in the solution of the first argument to the second question [in the interpolation above]) that God cannot be deceived, because his intellection with respect to something cannot stand with the opposite of it; so too his will cannot be impeded, because the ordination of it cannot stand with the opposite of what it has ordained.