Syncretistic Catholicism

Another Minority Report

another minority report

Syncretistic Catholicism where any Anglican, Episcopal, Roman & Orthodox consensus informs core beliefs & divergences are
received as valid theological opinions

A Defense of Double Agency – with a Goldilocks

account of divine sovereignty
I just re-read Fr. Aidan’s revised article, Predestination, Grace, and the Fear of
Determinism, the latest in his series of explorations, which test for coherence
Matthews Grant’s account of divine causality and dual sources.

Since Grant’s extrinsic libertarianism, Fr Rooney’s intrinsic libertarianism &

O’Neill’s compatibilism are all consistent with predestination & efficacious
grace, however their conceptions of freedom might otherwise vary,
universalism wouldn’t violate freedom in any of their models. See theo-
anthropo- note at the bottom.

Still, each of their models, in some way, must be employing impoverished

conceptions of freedom & rationality, since they all ostensibly presuppose
that one could freely & rationally, finally & definitively, reject God.

Each of them must, in some way, also be employing an impoverished

conception of love, which only has recourse to a logical greater good defense
that relies on a skeptically theistic mysterian appeal, which, to me anyway,
incredulously, implies that God, for now, must remain substantially
unintelligible, morally (as well as repugnant, aesthetically; abhorrent,
parentally; & absurd, common-sensically).

Still, stipulating that we could fix those conceptions of human freedom &
divine love, which theory of God’s causal sovereignty & human freedom,
above, might most recommend itself?

On the surface, I’d go with Grant’s account. That’s because it seems to me to

better fit the approaches of Maritain, Lonergan, McCabe, McCann, Burrell &
that ilk.

Here’s why:
First, to place my interpretation of the conversation in context –

On page 71 of _Free Will & God’s Universal Causality_, Grant cites Brian
Davies’s characterization of Aquinas’s position, a position presumably shared
by Davies himself:

(1) Some things or processes in the world come about of necessity; (2) some
do not; (3) yet both come about because of God’s creative activity, which is not
to be thought of as like that of a creaturely cause that renders its effect
inevitable (or determined or necessitated).

In footnote 51, Grant includes – among other contemporary representatives

of that tradition as described by Davies – Burrell, Lonergan, McCabe &
McCann. He suggests that McCann makes moves closest to ones made in
Chapter 4, Free Creatures of the Universal Cause.

The most salient commitment these thinkers seem to share, in my view, is, at
least, an implicit repudiation Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange’s “God determining
or determined: there is no other alternative.”

DBH dismantled this axiom of RG-L’s in “Impassibility as Transcendence: On

the Infinite Innocence of God,” in The Hidden and the Manifest: Essays in
Theology and Metaphysics (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2017), 168.

As for the Báñezian tradition, Grant charitably remains agnostic as to whether

or not it can adequately accommodate the divine transcendence. I don’t have
the philosophical chops to say whether or not it’s consistent with Dual
Sources or with libertarian freedom more generally. I have been following Fr
Rooney & Taylor O’Neill’s Nova et Vetera exchange, where Fr Rooney offers a
neo-Báñezian account that avoids compatibilism. Indeed, in Freedom, even if
God decrees it, Fr Rooney writes: Pace Grant, I take two classical theories of
grace associated with Domingo Banez and Luis de Molina and argue that these
are exempt from Grant’s attack on intrinsic models of divine causality. The
classical theories of grace can remain libertarian in just the same sense Grant’s
account is.

For those who’d appreciate an accessible back & forth between Báñezians,
like O’Neill, and the approaches of other thinkers like Grant, Lonergan &
Maritain, I recommed the blogging & podcasts of Pat Flynn. For example,
follow the links, below, as well as the many links embedded within these
articles:

God’s Impassibility and Knowledge of Sin

Predestination Debate: A Response to Dr. Taylor Patrick O’Neill’s Critique of

Jacques Maritain

In response to Trent’s “resistible efficacious grace that infallibly effects its

intended goal,” Bañez & Molina articulated competing theologies of
efficacious grace, including its metaphysical foundation. In my points, below, I
suggest that the manner in which they even formulate their questions runs
afoul Hart’s “Impassibility as Transcendence.” As noted above, Grant takes a
more agnostic stance toward how the Bañezian stance would fare in that
regard.

Any strengths in Grant’s account come from any of his concordances with
that DBH criterion as well as with his convergences with the approaches of
Maritain, Lonergan, McCabe, McCann, Burrell & that ilk.

An apparent weakness in Grant’s account is that it does not in the end

comport with DBH’s definition of perfect freedom, neither with respect to our
terminal nor our historical freedom, which only ever exists in direct proportion
to the rational competency of the agent.

Within classical theism, not all conceive sovereignty in all or nothing terms, as
if it must be only general or only meticulous. Among classical theists are
those for whom divine motion is general. Even within Thomism,
interpretations of divine motion have varied on a spectrum from inflationary
to deflationary. There are, then, diverse approaches to how it is that we & God
synergistically concur.

Our speculations regarding the nature & extent divine sovereignty are not idle.
And they’re not just about issues regarding moral culpability or navigating
Pelagianism vs Calvinism. We all have a practical stake in appropriately
conceiving divine sovereignty. While I don’t generally rely on logical defenses
& evidential theodicies to get God out of the dock, for many, a logical defense
of evil is important and its degree of plausibility may very well turn on the
coherence of any given conception of divine sovereignty. More ubiquitously,
various conceptions may be more versus less actionable, existentially, for our
diverse spiritualities, our lives of prayer & service. They will color our
communal worship and approaches to prayers of petition, intercession &
thanksgiving, as well as nurture our hopes for miracles. Whether or not we
conceive divine sovereignty in a sufficiently robust way can impact our
affective dispositions vis a vis divine intimacy. Finally, a plausible & coherent
account of freedom is indispensable to our post-mortem anthropology &
eschatology. Universalists are concerned that our children are susceptible,
formatively, to being spiritually deformed by perditionism.

I am seldom the designated hitter, pedagogically, especially for what can be

arcane theological realities. What I sketch out below represents my attempt
to defend a Thomist-inspired Double Agency.

My contention is that dual agency needn’t be conceived as one size fits all.
Accounts can vary in terms of variously inflationary vs deflationary stances of
divine sovereignty. In terms of plausibility, I aspire below to articulate a Double
Agency Account with a Goldilocks View of Divine Sovereignty.

In order to be fully accessible, I’d have to flesh out my abstractions with

concrete examples. In the meanwhile, I’ll place it here, storyboard-like, on the
outside chance it might help another soul.
1) The way Burrell, McCabe, McCann & their ilk understand freedom is not
really a direct over against Calvin, Bañez, Molina, et al.

2) Bañez & Molina are answering a question that makes no sense to those
who otherwise properly understand freedom and who otherwise properly
employ a single-storey theo-anthropology.

3) Following a proper understanding of freedom within a single-storey theo-

anthropology, with DBH we might say that Providence knowingly provides
suitably limited scopes of possibilities for any given choice. In so doing,
Providence thereby shapes the free course of secondary causation & leads it
to a universally good end with no violation of rational creatures’ freedom.

4) That DBH-approach would be more or less consistent with Burrell, McCabe,

McCann, Talbott et al?

5) It would be more or less sympathetic to Lonergan & Maritain, who didn’t

press their own logics quite far enough, eschatologically?

6) Per what I’m suggesting, above, it may be helpful to inquire how any given
thinker might approach the De Auxiliis controversy vis a vis Bañez
& Molina, divine & human freedom, freedom & grace, nature & grace, physical
pre-motion & moral predestination, etc

7) By approach, I don’t mean “solve” it. Rather, I mean to ask does one
a) choose a side?
b) consider the choices a false dichotomy? or
c) consider the contretemps, itself, a pseudo-problem?

8) Maritain properly sensed that neither choice yielded a good answer, but he,
regrettably, still tried to work with the question as framed.

9) Lonergan realized that the controversy was grounded in a bad question.

10) Indeed, Maritain & Lonergan’s best insights regarding what constitutes
rational freedom comport much better with the single-storeyed accounts of
Blondel, de Lubac & Hart, and not the two-tiered Thomism of RG-L.

11) Maritain & Lonergan knew a surd when they saw one, sin. The notion of a
fully free, fully rational, definitive rejection of God would ergo be totally
absurd. So, any infernalist residue in their accounts could only have been
fideistic? It certainly wouldn’t follow from their theoanthropo-logic?

12) Clearly, many universalists subscribe to the proper conception of

freedom, i.e. as per DBH, Burrell, et al. Also, they accept the single-storey
Lubacian theoanthropology?

13) At this conceptual juncture, we have merely established a definition of

freedom & theoanthropo-grammar, which reflects that we the divine & human
are mutually constituted. We have not further stipulated, metaphysically,
precisely where the divine causal joints are located and how the divine-human
interactions occur?

14) And I’m saying that we haven’t yet fully specified these interactions in the
vaguest of causal terms, even, i.e. existential, essential, efficient, material,
formal & final, as well as regarding the manner of reduction of limiting
potencies by acts, which are variously synergistic.

15) Let’s return, now, to how Providence knowingly provides suitably

limited scopes of possibilities for any given choice. Is it not here that we will
locate certain impasses and debate degrees of plausibility? How might
different folks define that degree of limitation which would be suitable?

16) This might be to ask how inflationary or deflationary one’s view of divine
soveriegnty might be in terms of those degrees of limitation, e.g how
many metaphysical items one’s ontology of divine motion might include?

17) This might be to ask, also, despite how many metaphysical items
one’s ontology of divine motion might include, what view might one have
regarding the frequency of any given divine motion on any given subset of
metaphysical items?

18) Further, is there no room for divine attenuations of both the frequency &
the amplitude of divine interventions, especially as would pertain to any given
subset of metaphysical items? Yes, I’m thinking of all manner of efficacious
gracings, e.g. healings, infused prayer, myriad consolations, purgative graces,
transitory beatific visions, etc.

19) Properly conceived as suitably divinely attenuated, dual agency, alone,

needn’t be unsavory? It needn’t entail an inflationary divine sovereignty, e.g.
either a comprehensive physical premotion or thoroughgoing moral
predestination? It certainly couldn’t entail a wholly deflationary account either,
at least, not without discarding indispensable theotic synergisms?

20) This is all just to say that I’ve never concluded that every account of
double agency is necessarily tantamount to some type of Bañezian
universalism or inverted Calvinism.

21) Many do seem to take great comfort in hyperinflationary accounts of

divine sovereignty. They find it deeply consoling to include far
more metaphysical items in their ontology of divine motion. I sympathize with
that. I just believe the Spirit’s presence is ordinarily high frequency – low
amplitude, only extraordinarily low frequency – high amplitude. This
Goldilocks account of divine sovereignty has profound practical implications
for my life of prayer & Charismatic sensibilities, also for vigilantly remaining
on the lookout for those consolations that will strengthen me that I may
better serve (the water, said Teresa, is for the flowers). I’m ever on the lookout
for signs in the heavens above & wonders on the earth below. Those will mostly
be manifested in earthen vessels, in the wealth untold of my interpersonal
relationships and as further revealed in my own & my loved ones’ ongoing
theotic transformations & Lonerganian conversions. Confer, too, Joe
Bracken’s The ‘Contemplation to Attain Love’ as an Experience of Pentecost:
Theological Implications, where he employs the universal dynamic of
intersubjectivity to explain the Spiritual Exercises.

22) Let me clarify (or obfuscate) why how one employs these causal terms
might matter in terms of degrees of coercion vis a vis existential, essential,
efficient, material, formal & final causes, as well as regarding the manner of
reduction of limiting potencies by acts, which are variously synergistic.

23) By dual agency, those of us who employ the right definition of freedom in
a single storey anthropology could believe that all creatures are being
sustained by a creatio continua as well as constitutively indwelled, whereby the
Spirit’s presence affects us as form to matter.

24) Even transitory beatific visions would affect volition by acting on – not the
will, but – the intellect. All that we learn via general revelation by experience &
all that we learn via special revelation by faith involves the reduction of final
theotic potencies by formal acts of the intellect (epistemic closures).

25) Our volition, as informed by the intellect (in each epistemic closure), then,
integrally engages the will in a manner that’s always non-necessitating. The
will, for its part, may ignore, refuse, assent or even remain quiescent (e.g.
absence of refusal) as any given grace (type or intensity of presence) is
gifted.

26) For each & every given type or degree of im/mediate divine presencing,
Providence will knowingly provide suitably limited scopes of possibilities for
any given choice. In so doing, Providence will thereby shape the free course
of secondary causation & lead it to a universally good end with no violation of
rational creatures’ freedom.

27) The difference between a sufficient & efficacious grace does not
necessarily inhere in a particular gracing or presence, itself. Rather, it often
lies in whether or not & how a particular rational agent will respond to a
particular presence, manifestation or sign. An efficacious grace elicits a
response where a rational agent will infallibly & freely follow his natural
inclinations given a particular limitation in one’s scope of possible choices.
That overall scope may have been preordained while any particular limitations
remain variously open.

28) Thus we are free even in an everlasting beatific vision. Thus we remain
free even in an historical, transitory beatific vision. But any time one’s scope
of possible choices gets limited in various ways & to different extents, there is
no question that one’s autonomy (a richer experience of freedom) will get
sacrificed to some degree.
29) So, in terms of divine coercion, while there is never a violation of a rational
agent’s will per se, there can be a broadening or narrowing of her range of
options via all manner & degrees of divine determination. Everyone is
adequately determined & sufficiently free. How could one not say yes to being
the Mother of God? Who will, in the end, not finally say: “Be it done to me
according to Your Logos & logoi!“

30) All of the above applies only in that context within which I believe that,
constitutively, we are already fully equipped ontologically with a nature
proportionate to, ergo furnished epistemically with a noetic identity adequate
for, the beatific vision.

31) Enter the Calvinists who believe we are totally depraved or the Bañezians
who imagine that we aren’t constitutively indwelled & lack a nature
proportionate to or even an intrinsic desire for the beatific vision. We are no
longer talking about formal causes & intellects but are talking about efficient
causes concerning superadditions to the ill-equipped will, itself.

32) When it comes to divine interventions regarding secondary causes, there’s

nothing in them, in & of themselves, that need be conceived as repugnant to
our free will. Whether in the God-winks of rainbows or the miraculous cures of
Lourdes, unquestionably, there are efficient causes in play. Such could,
logically, even include a new & improved will, though I otherwise don’t believe,
empirically, that’s necessary or happens to be how epistemic closures take
place.

33) What does seem totally implausible is a divine economy so bereft of

interdeterminacies that Providence must be busying Himself with actively &
efficiently reducing the limited material potencies of every butterfly in each
flap of its wings.

34) Whether one believes our epistemic closures are brought about
synergistically via formal acts that reduce final potencies vis a vis the intellect
as would infallibly influence the will or by efficient acts as would outfit us with
new epistemic equipment — what does seem repugnant is the thought that
God would eventually efficaciously purge some but not all vicious natures,
even though such purgative graces would do no violence to anyone’s
freedom.

35) The above represents my attempt to differentiate dual agency accounts in

terms of deflationary vs inflationary accounts of divine sovereignty. I have
elsewhere set forth my logical defense of divinely attenuated efficacious
presencings as are always ordered toward globally optimizing (even when
locally sacrificing) the autonomy of rational creatures toward the end of the
greater glory of God, AMDG, theophanically, and as realized in our expanded
scopes of divine intimacy, beatitudinally.

36) This has been a follow to

For the Greater Glory of God

Theo-anthropo Note

It does seem to me that the whole back & forth between JDR & TPO (and
Grant, for that matter) results from their commitment to a two-tiered
Thomism (concrete natura pura) and would paradigmatically dissolve (not
dialectically resolve) in the single-storeyed account, where the human & divine
are co-constitutive, where the human person is constitutively & mutually
indwelled, although we’re only aware of the divine presence in a fallible, yet
progressive, way, thus always acting with some degree, however meager, of
human-divine synergy (which includes, for example, our natural inclinations,
our non-culpable defects, our jointly sufficient divine-human acts, etc).

JDR gives a nod in this direction using a reasonable conception of joint

sufficiency vis a vis the divine dwelling & efficacious grace. But because his
grace-nature account is two-tiered, it leaves us as rational creatures
contingently rather than constitutively indwelled.

What should be contingent, it seems, is not the fact of our indwelling but,
rather, our degree of awareness of all manner & degrees of multiply-incarnate
divine presencings, intrinsic & extrinsic. Such requires the journey of
epistemic closure & fosters our autonomous soul-crafting self-
determinations. Such is theosis.

Similarly, certain other false dichotomies will dissolve & conflations will
disambiguate with the proper conceptions of human freedom & divine love,
and proper nature-grace relationship: internal vs external models, efficient vs
formal acts, material vs final potencies, ontic vs moral evils, fallible vs
culpable defects, etc

JDR makes another move in response to the infamous RG-L maxim: “God is
either determining or determined, there is no other alternative.” He agrees with
Stump’s denial that knowledge of some fact about what a creature freely
does requires that God be causally acted upon by the creature. He agrees that
“God can be eternal and know the free actions of creatures, then, without
causing them or without being causally affected by those actions.” And he
expands on Timpe’s point that “contemporary accounts of truth-making, the
relation holding between a true proposition and whatever that makes or
necessitates the truth of that proposition, is not a causal relation.”

JDR rejects theological determinism as “the view that God’s decisions are
individually and totally sufficient to account for all the contingent truths about
creaturely actions.”
JDR analyzes Grant’s account of concurrence, regarding effects where it
seems that God would be a sufficient cause of one’s choosing & we would be
a sufficient cause of our choosing, suggesting that these must be only jointly
sufficient, not individually so. But how so? God can be both eternal &
responsive to creatures in time without being causally affected, without
violating simplicity.

Even a neo-Báñezian-libertarian could advance a universalist account,

wherein – what would be monergic would be each person’s creatio ex nihilo
with a divine-human co-constitution & indwelling (contra any concrete natura
pura). What’s would be synergic is 1) how that co-constitutive indwelling
works, gifting us those free natural inclinations that we’ll infallibly follow when
efficaciously graced, as well as 2) how every act is a human-divine reality, its
effects ensuing from causes that are jointly, not individually, sufficient.

Most understand that it would be wrong to characterize Aquinas vs Scotus as

a thoroughgoing intellectualist vs voluntarist. While one may emphasize the
intellect & the other the will, neither ever wholely negates the other aspect of
volition. e.g. Scotus is, then, moderately voluntarist.

It seems to me that something similar is in play in competing accounts like

Grant’s extrinsic libertarianism, Fr Rooney’s intrinsic libertarianism & O’Neill’s
compatibilism. Those stances aren’t as far apart as many suppose.

On a close read, it seems to me that they’re often using differently defined

terms & applying them to different categories, e.g. creation vs motion. So,
they’ll end up variously interpreting patterns of divine-human interactivity by
moreso emphasizing particular aspects of freedom or determination, as
influenced interiorly or exteriorly, transcendently or temporally, etc

Those competing stances, in my view, are best characterized as moderately

libertarian or moderately compatibilist. And any of them could be co-opted by
universalists, who’d employ proper understandings of freedom, both terminal
(beatific vision) & historical (epistemically distanced), while eschewing any
concrete natura pura.

For the universalists, conceptions like election, predestination & efficacious

grace would apply to all manner of mystical realities even while perdition,
itself, would not even refer.

Indeed, almost every metaphysical idiom or divine sovereignty model would

work more seamlessly, theologically, and with fewer contrivances,
philosophically, if it didn’t have to bite the perditionism bullet, when modeling
predestination & efficacious grace together with freedom.

What all of those competing accounts have (or could have) in common is that
strategies like decrees & premotion have more to do with divine epistemology
than human freedom. They have more to do with properly accounting for
divine acts & avoiding passivity and with grounding counterfactuals (or not)
and nothing to do with creaturely necessitation. They have more to do with
preserving divine simplicity than conserving or violating creaturely autonomy.

I think that most of the confusion surrounding strategies like premotion come
from conflating notions as popularly conceived regarding natural determinism
with those that would pertain to a valid theological determinism. Such causal
terms do not apply univocally between those otherwise analogical
determinisms. Eternal causes interact with creatures in our realm of
determinate being in a manner that’s wholly non-necessitating vis a vis our
rational wills, precisely because nature, as divinely created, is permeated with
contingencies. Whichever model one chooses to ground counterfactuals (or
not), to preserve simplicity & respect human freedom, our patterns of divine-
human interactivity vis a vis jointly sufficient motions (&, in some sense,
perhaps even jointly sufficient co-creation?!) will remain inalterably
synergistic, even as that synergism may vary in degrees of divine-human
a/symmetry.

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John Sobert Sylvest November 15, 2023 Uncategorized

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