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Stoics adopted a form of materialistic Pantheism.
God and tlie world are one. All the world's move-
ments are governed by rigid law. Unvaried causality,
unity of design, fatalistic government, prophecy and
foreknowledge — all these factors exclude chance and
the possibility of free will. Epicurus, oddly in con-
trast here with his modern hedonistic followers, ad-
vocates free will and modifies the strict determinism of
the atomists, whose physics he accepts, by ascribing to
the atoms a clinamen, a faculty of random deviation in
their movements. His openly professed object, how-
ever, in this point as in the rest of his philosophy, is to
release men from the fears caused by belief in irre-
sistible fate.
Free Will and the Christian Religion. — The problem of free will assumed quite a new character with the ad- vent of the Christian religion. The doctrine that God has created man, has commanded him to obey the moral law, and has promised to reward or punish him for observance or violation of this law, made the real- ity of moral liberty an issue of transcendent impor- tance. Unless man is really free, he cannot be justly held responsible for his actions, any more than for the date of his birth or the colour of his eyes. All alike are inexorably predetermined for him. Again, the diffi- culty of the question was augmented still further by the Christian dogma of the fall of man and his redemp- tion by grace. St. Paul, especially in his Epistle to the Romans, is the great source of the Catholic theol- ogy of grace.
Catholic Doctrine. — Among the early Fathers of the Church, St. Augustine stands pre-eminent in his hand- ling of this subject. He clearly teaches the freedom of the will against the Maniehceans, but insists against the Semipelagians on the necessity of grace, as a foun- dation of merit. He also emphasizes very strongly the absolute rule of God over men's wills by His omnipo- tence and omniscience — through the infinite store, as it were, of motives which He has had at His disposal from all eternity, and by the foreknowledge of those to which the will of each human being would freely consent. St. Augustine's teaching formed the basis of much of the later theology of the Church on these ques- tions, though other writers have sought to soften the more rigorous portions of his doctrine. This they did especially in opposition to heretical authors, who ex- aggerated these features in the works of the great Afri- can Doctor and attempted to deduce from liis princi- ples a form of rigid predeterminism little differing from fatalism. The teaching of St. Augustine is developed by St. Thomas Aquinas both in theology and philoso- phy. Will is rational appetite. Man necessarily de- sires beatitude, but he can freely choose between dif- ferent forms of it. Free will is simply this elective power. Infinite Good is not visible to the intellect in this life. There are always some drawbacks and de- ficiencies in every good presented to us. None of them exhausts our intellectual capacity of conceiving the good. Consequently, in deliberate volition, not one of them completely satiates or irresistibly entices the will. In this capability of the intellect for conceiving the universal lies the root of our freedom. But God possesses an infallible knowledge of man's future ac- tions. How is this prevision possible, if man's future acts are not necessary? God does not exist in time. The future and the past are alike ever present to the eternal mind. As a man gazing down from a lofty mountain takes in at one momentary glance all the objects which can be apprehended only through a lengthy series of successive experiences by travellers along the winding road beneath, in somewhat similar fashion the intuitive vision of God apprehends simul- taneously what is future to us with all it contains. Further, God's omnipotent providence exercises a complete and perfect control over all events that hap- pen, or will happen, in the universe. How is this eecured without infringement of man's freedom?
Here is the problem which two distinguished schools
in the Church — both claiming to represent the teach-
ing, or at any rate the logical development of the
teaching of St. Thomas — attempt to solve in different
ways. The heresies of Luther and Calvin brought the
issue to a finer point than it had reached in the time of
Aquinas, consequently he had not formally dealt with
it in its ultimate shape, and each of the two schools
can cite texts from the works of the Angelic Doctor in
which he appears to incline towards their particular
view.
Thomist and Molinist Theories. — The Dominican or Thomist solution, as it is called, teaches in brief that God premoves each man in all his acts to the line of conduct which he subsequently adopts. It holds that this premotive decree inclines man's will with absolute certainty to the side decreed, but that God adapts this premotion to the nature of the being thus premoved. It argues that as God possesses infinite power He can infallibly premove man — who is by nature a free cause — to choose a particular course freely, whilst He premoves the lower animals in harmony with their natures to adopt particular courses by necessity. Fur- ther, this premotive decree being inevitable, though adapted to suit the free natiu'e of man, pro\'ides a me- dium in which God foresees with certainty the future free choice of the human being. The premotive decree is thus prior in order of thought to the Divine cogni- tion of man's future actions. Theologians and philo- .sophers of the Jesuit School, frequently styled Molin- ists, though they do not accept the whole of Molina's teaching and generally prefer Suarez's exposition of the theory, deem the above solution unsatisfactory. It would, they readily admit, provide sufficiently for the infallibility of the Divine foreknowledge and also for God's providential control of the world's history; but, in their view, it fails to give at the same time an adequately intelligible accomit of the freedom of the human will. According to them, the relation of the Divine action to man's will should be conceived rather as of a concurrent than of a premotiv'c character; and they maintain that God's knowledge of what a free being would choose, if the necessary conditions were supplied, must be deemed logically prior to any decree of concurrence or premotion in respect to that act of choice. Briefly, they make a threefold distinction in God's knowledge of the imiverse based on the nature of the objects known — the Divine knowledge being in itself of course absolutely simple. Objects or events viewed merely as possible, God is said to apprehend by simple intelligence (simplex intelligentia). Events which will happen He knows by vision {scientia visi- onis). Intermediate between these are conditionally future events — things which would occur were certain conditions fulfilled. God's knowledge of this_ class of contingencies they term scientia media. For instance Christ affirmed that, if certain miracles had been wrought in Tyre and Sidon, the inhabitants would have been converted. The condition was not realized, yet the statement of Christ must have been true. About all such conditional contingencies propositions may be framed which are either true or false — and Infinite Intelligence nuist know all truth. The condi- tions in many cases will not be realized, so God must know them apart from any decrees determining their realization. He knows them therefore, this school holds, iti seipsis, in themselves as conditionally future events. This knowledge is the scientia inedia, " middle knowledge", intermediate between vision of the actual future and simple understanding of the merely possi- ble. Acting now in the light of tliis ncientia media with respect to human volitions, God freely tlecides accord- ing to His own wisdom whether He shall supply the requisite conditions, including His co-operation in the action, or abstain from so doing, and thus render pos- sible or prevent the realization of the event. In other words, the infinite intelligence of God sees clearly what
