Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Compatibilism and Contingency in Aquinas

Author(s): Calvin G. Normore
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 80, No. 10, Part 2: Eightieth Annual Meeting of
the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division (Oct., 1983), pp. 650-652
Published by: Journal of Philosophy, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2026517
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650 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

COMPATIBILISM AND CONTINGENCY IN AQUINAS*

A quinas is prepared to admit that doing something freely is

compatible with there being no chance that one might do
otherwise. He claims that predestination, which involves
some divine direction or preparation of the person elected, "pro-
duces its effect infallibly" and yields not only the certainty a person
might have about those things which he is in the best possible po-
sition to know, but a stronger certainty grounded in the infallible
connection between the divine preparation and its effect (De Veritate
q. 6, art. 3). Nevertheless Aquinas believes that the elected person's
cooperation with divine help is free and, as Professor Kretzmann
points out, he believes that free choice involves acting not necessar-
ily but "of one's own accord". One way of reconciling these beliefs
is to distinguish the necessity involved from the ground of the in-
fallibility required of the connection between a predestining cause
and its effect. The key to this distinction is another distinction
Aquinas borrows from the tradition, that between absolute and rel-
ative or hypothetical necessity. Relative to an illuminated intellect
and to the natural tendency to seek the good, the will is not able to
choose badly (De Veritate q. 24 art. 8), but this relative necessity is
not absolute because God illuminates the intellect (or directs in
other ways) only contingently. Thus, it seems, Aquinas is commit-
ted to a position Scotus embraces-that it is because God's choice
of whether and what to create is contingent that there is contin-
gency in the world.
As Kretzmann suggests, there are prima facie difficulties raised
for Aquinas's claim that God's choice to create and to create this
world is contingent, by the principle that goodness is, of itself, dif-
fusive. But these difficulties could be resolved fairly easily within
Aquinas's framework, if only he believed that 'goodness' is univo-
cal between God and creatures. The key to the solution would be to
recognize that, because the goodness of God is infinite and the
goodness of everything else is finite, God plus a created world is,
strictly speaking, no better than God alone. Thus the "Dionysian"
principle that goodness tends to diffuse itself-interpreted as the
principle that goodness tends to make a world as good (or as full of
being) as possible-would be satisfied whether or not God creates.
If, instead, we interpret the Dionysian principle as claiming that

* Abstract of a paper to be read at an APA symposium, December 29, 1983, com-

menting on Norman Kretzmann, "Goodness, Knowledge and Indeterminacy in the
Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas"; see this JOUrRNAL this issue, 631-649.

0022-362X/83/8010/0650$00.50 O 1983 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

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 THE PHILOSOPHY OF THOMAS AQUINAS 651

goodness tends to diffuse itself to as many things as possible (to

make as many goods or beings as possible), then we have an argu-
ment not only that God must create but that he must create an in-
finity of things and thus an argument for either the existence of a
simultaneous infinite or time's lacking either a beginning or an
end. Such considerations cut against this sort of interpretation. But
Aquinas does not accept the univocity of goodness between God
and creatures. This raises a number of problems for the interpreta-
tion of the Dionysian principle within his metaphysics, which are
close analogues of traditional problems for the understanding of
his views about creation and causation generally.
Even if God is free to create or not there may be nontrivial con-
straints imposed by his goodness on what can be created. Kretz-
mann suggests that because there is no best possible world God
cannot be constrained to create it, and so God is free to create any
optimally structured world. But there is another alternative dis-
cussed in the fourteenth century, namely that God create all the
possible worlds. This would ensure that one could not bring the
charge that he could have done better, and, given an Aristotelian
account of what a world is, it should be within God's power.
Aquinas does not consider this alternative, and one reason, I
think, is that he is deeply ambivalent about God's relation to time.
On the one hand he seems to want the view that Kretzmann and
Eleonore Stump have found in Boethius-that God is (eternally)
similarly related to all the moments of time. On the other hand
there are places (like S. T. I q. 25 art. 4 ad]) where he seems to admit
an objective distinction between past and future. If Aquinas's offi-
cial view is that God is similarly related to all the moments of time,
then, given his doctrine that the world could have been eternal, he
is committed to the view that God could be related to what is from
his perspective an actual infinity of things. Why then could God
not be so related to an infinite number of Aristotelian worlds? And
what then grounds Aquinas's view that a simultaneous infinite
may be impossible?
I suspect that Aquinas does not deploy his official view of God's
relation to time here because there are deep tensions between it and
other aspects of his metaphysics-in particular between it and the
view that creatures are substances which have all of their parts at
once and which endure through time. There is no place in mediae-
val Latin metaphysics for an ontology of temporal stages, but
something like that seems required by Aquinas's official view.
I conclude that Aquinas can solve the problems for his account
of contingency posed by his picture of divine goodness. He can

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652 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

even solve the problem created by his view that divine knowledge is
active, though only by being a compatibilist. But what Aquinas
cannot solve within his metaphysical framework is the problem of
divine foreknowledge itself.
CALVIN G. NORMORE

Columbia University

AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL ASSOCIATION

EASTERN DIVISION

Abstracts of Invited Papers to Be Read

at the Eightieth Annual Meeting

REASON, JUDGMENT, AND THE DESIRE TO BE

RATIONAL*

M t r UST a fully rational agent have a conception of rational-

ity? Or might the rationality of his conduct be emergent
and unselfconscious? My central thesis is that full ration-
ality includes a capacity for rational judgment and a regulative de-
sire to do what is rational. This desire is regulative in two senses:
de facto and de jure. It governs the rational agent through his con-
ception of its authority.
I defend this thesis by considering two contrasting models of
agency. The Butlerian model includes as central the agent's reflec-
tive judgment of reasons for her choices. Hobbesian models ex-
clude this feature. They explain the rational agent's conduct as re-
sulting from various dispositions-beliefs and desires-describable
without a conception of rational justification. I consider Hobbes-
ian models of increasing complexity to see whether such a picture
of rational agency can be made convincing without rational judg-
ment. While these models are made more plausible by introducing
second-order desires, a (de facto) governing desire to act on desires
that survive "Brandtian correction" by facts and logic, and, in the
limit, dispositions that "track" principles of an adequate norma-
tive theory of rational conduct, I argue nevertheless that these mod-
els all fail, and that a fully rational agent will be Butlerian. Some
reasons supporting this conclusion are: (a) Since the correct norma-
tive conception of rational conduct is itself a matter of controversy,
a fully rational agent should possess the conceptual means neces-
sary to assess her own conception critically; (b) even the most so-

*Abstract of an APA invited paper, to be presented December 30, 1983. Susan Wo

will comment.

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