For nearly the last five
centuries the Thomistic conversation regarding premotion of sin, providence,
predestination, and reprobation has largely centered around the great debates
between the Order of Preachers and the Society of Jesus, arbitrated by the
Church’s Congregretatio de Auxiliis. At the forefront of these often intense debates
was an attempted rapprochement between God’s causal influence on the created
will and the integrity of human freedom. “The Dominicans declared that the Jesuits
conceded too much to free will, and so tended toward Pelagianism. In turn, the
Jesuits complained that the Dominicans did not sufficiently safeguard human
liberty, and seemed in consequence to lean towards Calvinism.”
The period of this great debate de
auxiliis is often said to have begun in 1581, spanning over twenty years
before effectively ending in a stalemate in 1607. During its time, the
Congregatio held eighty-five conferences, which were presented before Popes Clement
VIII, Leo IX, and Paul V, featuring the greatest and most preeminent minds that
the sixteenth-century Dominicans and Jesuits had to offer. At the heart of the beginning
of the controversy was the censure of the works of Luis de Molina and the
condemnations that Molina and Spanish Dominican Domingo Báñez launched against
each other. By the closing of the Congregatio in 1607, both sides had been told
that they could maintain and defend their respective schemas (after a brief
silence for both parties), but steps were taken to greatly limit the vitriolic climate
which had erupted between the two sides.
While the debate may have
softened somewhat since the Congregatio, it has largely continued, spilling
over even into the early twentieth century. Up until recently, much ink had
been spilled continuing the debate between the Jesuit scientia media and
simultaneous concurrence and the Dominican physical premotion and election,
which is ante praevisa merita. This debate had certainly continued to
animate much of the theological writing in the twentieth century regarding
premotion, the permission of sin, providence, predestination, and reprobation.
However, with the death of many of the great figures of that twentieth-century
debate, the disputation between the Dominicans and the Jesuits seems to have
slowed considerably. (Taylor Patrick O’Neill, Grace, Predestination, and the
Permission of Sin [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press,
2019], 1-2)
