Human Freedom and Divine Sovereignty in Late Scholasticism

(Molina, Bellarmino, Suárez)

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the debates on the nature of free will in the wake of Luis de Molina’s Concordia liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis. The controversy which followed the publication of this groundbreaking theological synthesis in 1588, is approached here from the perspective of broader social developments which social historians associate with the phenomenon called functional differentiation. From this angle, Molina’s campaign for a libertarian concept of the will is not only a domestic affair for theologians, it is one of the milestones of modernity, as it gives rise to new-style approaches to the unity of a systemic whole. The unity of the universe, in Molina, is not a given, it is the result of processes of integration intended to coordinate various metaphysical domains which can no longer be held together by the all-encompassing emanative causality of God. The reason is that Molina’s account of freedom does not allow God to govern the world by his own causal activity, for no intelligence, not even an infinite one, can know with certainty the outcome of a decision from any source, other than the decision itself. By consequence, God’s causal participation in events cannot be the true basis of his knowledge of the future. From the fact that libertarian concepts of free will sever the internal link between human action and providential causation so that they cannot be reduced to one another, it follows that the autonomous systems resulting from this situation must mutually accommodate each other externally, by some complementary mechanisms of coordination. Coordinating mechanisms (such as middle knowledge, God’s noetic supereminence over his creatures, and congruism) are needed to ensure the smooth functioning of the system as a whole. Based on the analysis of these systemic requirements, it will be argued that Molina’s proposal, as well as its modulations in the congruist systems of Bellarmino and Suárez, are early attempts to provide a theory of functionally coordinated autonomous systems, which play a foundational role in modernity.