Question Three. Whether Christ was Predestined to be Son of God

55. Third I ask whether Christ was predestined to be Son of God.

56. That he was not:

Because he was not predestined to be Son of God in respect of his being Son of God, since predestination did not precede the existence of the Son of God, for predestination states a preceding to that which is predestined; nor was he predestined in respect of his being man, because a thing predestined to be of some sort in some respect is of that sort in that respect - therefore if he was predestined to be Son of God in respect of his being man, then the Son of God is Son of God in respect of his being man, which is false.

57. On the contrary:

Romans 1.3-4, “He was made of the seed of David, who was predestined to be Son of God in power.”

I. To the Question

58. I reply.

Since ‘predestination’ is principally a pre-ordering of someone to glory and to other things in their order to glory, and because glory for this human nature in Christ, and the union of it with the Word in order to glory, were pre-ordered, since a glory as great as has now been conferred on it should not have been conferred on it if it were not united to the Word - therefore, just as the merits, without which someone would not be ordered fittingly to a glory as great as he would be ordered to with them, fall under predestination, so this union, which is ordered fittingly to so great a glory, though not by way of merit, fell under predestination; and thus, just as this nature’s being united to the Word was predestined, so the Word’s being man and this man’s being the Word were predestined. -The inferences are proved by way of likeness, as was said about passive making [nn.44-48].

59. And if you say [Godfrey of Fontaines, Aquinas] that ‘predestination regards first the person, and so it is necessary to find first here some person to whom first God predestined glory and the union in its order to glory; but he did not predestine this union to any divine person (plainly not to the person of the Word as of the Word; and not to that person as human nature, because in this sense the union is included)’ - I reply: the proposition that ‘predestination regards the person alone’ can be denied; for just as God can love any good other than himself (not merely the supposit but the nature), so also can he pre-choose or pre-order for something other than himself a good fitting to that other, and thus he can pre-choose glory and a union in order to glory for the nature and not only for the person. However it is true that, in all other cases besides this one, predestination regards the person, because in no other case has God pre-ordered a good for the nature save by pre-ordering a good for the person, because a nature for which a good can thus be pre-ordered exists only in a created person. It is not so in the issue at hand.

II. Doubts and their Solution

A. First Doubt

60. But here there are two doubts. The first is whether this predestination [of Christ] necessarily requires a preceding fall of human nature, which the many authorities seem to mean that say the Son of God would never have been incarnate if man had not fallen.

61. It can, without prejudice, be said that, since the predestination of anyone to glory naturally precedes, on the part of the object, foreknowledge of the sin or damnation of anyone (according to the final opinion stated in 1 d.41 nn.40-42 [i.e. Scotus’ own opinion]), much more is this true of the predestination of the soul that was predestined to the highest glory; for universally, he who wills in an ordered way seems to will what is closer to the end first, and so, just as God wills glory for someone before he wills grace, thus too, among the predestined (to whom he wills glory), he seems to will in an ordered way glory first for him whom he wills to be closest to the end, and so to will it first for this soul [of Christ].a

a.a [Interpolation] he first wills glory for this soul before he wills glory for any other soul, and he first wills grace and glory for any other soul before he foresees in it the opposites of these habits; therefore, from the beginning, he first wills glory for the soul of Christ before he foresees that Adam will fall.

62. All the authorities [n.60] can be expounded as follows, namely that Christ would not have come as redeemer if man had not fallen - nor perhaps have come as capable of suffering, because neither was there any necessity that that soul - glorious from the beginning, for which God pre-chose not only the highest glory but also a glory coeval with the soul - would have been united to a body capable of suffering; but neither would redemption have had to be made if man had not sinned.

63. But not for this redemption alone does God seem to have predestined this soul for so great glory, since the redemption or glory of a soul needing to be redeemed is not as great a good as the glory of the soul of Christ.

64. Nor is it likely that so supreme a good among beings was only occasioned because of a merely lesser good.

65. Nor is it likely that God preordained Adam to so great a good before he preordained Christ, which however would follow.

66. Indeed, what is more absurd, it would also follow further that God, when preordaining Adam to glory, would have foreseen that Adam would fall into sin before he would have predestined Christ to glory - supposing the predestination of Christ’s soul was only for the redemption of others.a

a.a [Interpolation] because redemption would not have happened if the fall and fault had not preceded.

67. One can therefore say that God, prior to foreseeing anything about sinner or sin or punishment, pre-chose for his heavenly court all those whom he wished to have there - angels and men - in definite and determinate degrees; and no one was predestined merely because another was foreseen as going to fall, so that thus no one would have to rejoice in the fall of someone else.

B. Second Doubt

68. The second doubt concerns whether the union of this nature with the Word was foreseen first or whether its order to glory was.

69. One can say that since in the action of an artificer the process of execution of the work is opposite to the order of intention, and since God in the order of execution united human nature to himself first in nature before conferring on it supreme grace and glory, then the opposite can be posited in his intention, so that God first wills some non-supreme [sc. non-angelic] nature to have supreme glory, showing that he need not confer glory according to the order of natures, and then secondly, as it were, he willed that that nature exist in the person of the Word (so that the angel would thus not be placed beneath man).

III. To the Principal Argument

70. As to the argument [n.56] one can concede that, in respect of his being man, he was predestined to be Son of God to the extent the ‘in respect of’ states the formal idea according to which the extreme term is taken determinately in itself; for the man is formally God, and his predestination to be God preceded the man, that is, the person as existing in human nature; thus is the man made God. But if the ‘in respect of’ be taken properly as a mark of reduplication [cf. d.6 n.61 footnote], namely such that it states the cause of the inherence of the predicate in the subject, then in this way he is not God in respect of his being man, because he is not God by humanity.

71. One can, in another way, distinguish the major [n.56] when it says ‘he was predestined to be God in respect of his being God’, namely that the ‘in respect of’ can determine the act of predestination in the sense of ‘he is God in respect of the fact he was predestined’, or that it can determine the term of predestination thus, ‘he is God in respect of the fact he is God’. In the first way the major is false and the minor true [sc. that predestination precedes what is predestined]; in the second way the major is true and the minor false.

72. One can, in a third way, say, and perhaps more really, that neither in respect of his being man nor in respect of his being God was he predestined to be Son of God, because the phrase ‘to be predestined to be Son of God’ includes two things, one of which requires in the term something temporal (namely the ‘to be predestined’), and the other of which requires the term to be eternal (namely the ‘to be Son of God’). But, as it is, there is no thing the same that is the reason for both of them in the term; for although in the term two things come together, one temporal (which can be the term of the predestination) and the other eternal (because of which ‘to be Son of God’ may belong to the term), yet no one nature is the reason for both of these belonging to the term. But if something else were allowed to be the ‘in respect of’ as to the whole predicate, then a cause in respect of both in the predicate would be being indicated; and therefore properly - logically speaking - neither in respect of his being man nor in respect of his being God or Son of God is he predestined to be God or Son of God.