In influencing His creatures, however, God adapts [pg 233] himself to the peculiar nature of each. The necessary causes He determines to act necessarily, the free causes, freely. All receive from Him their substance and their mode of action.[707] The rational creature, therefore, though subject to His determining influence, acts with perfect freedom, just as if it were not moved.
b) In spite of free-will, however, the influence which God exerts on His rational creatures is irresistible because it proceeds from an absolute and omnipotent Being whose decrees brook no opposition. What God wills infallibly happens.[708]
Nevertheless, God is not the author of sin. He moves the sinner to perform an act; but He does not move Him to perform a sinful act. The malice of sin derives solely from the free will of man.[709]
c) Since the divine influence causally precedes all creatural acts, God's concurrence with creatural causes (concursus generalis) must be conceived as prevenient, not simultaneous. The Divine Omnipotence not only makes the action possible, but likewise effects it by moving the will from potentiality to actuality.[710] Consequently, the causal influence which the Creator exerts upon His creatures is not a mere motio, but a praemotio,—and not [pg 234] merely moral, but physical (praemotio physica).[711] It is by physical premotion that God's prevenient influence effects the free actions of His creatures, without regard to their assent.[712] Free-will is predetermined by God before it determines itself.[713]
d) If we analyse God's physical predeterminations in so far as they are created entities, we find that they are nothing else than the effect and execution of His eternal decrees, embodied in the praedeterminatio physica. It is the temporal execution of the latter that is called praemotio physica. Hence we are justified in speaking, not only of a temporal praemotio, but of an eternal praedeterminatio, in fact the terms are often used synonymously.[714]
Viewed in its relation to rational creatures, this eternal predetermination is nothing but a temporal premotion of the free will to determine itself. Since God has from all eternity made absolute and conditional decrees, which possess the power of physical predetermination without regard to the free consent of His creatures, physical [pg 235] predetermination constitutes an infallible medium by which He can foreknow their future free actions, and hence there is no need of a scientia media. If God knows His own will, He must also know the free determinations included therein. To deny this would be to destroy the very foundation of His foreknowledge.[715]
This is merely the philosophical basis of the Thomistic system. Its champions carry the argument into the theological domain by reasoning as follows: What is true in the natural must be equally true in the supernatural sphere, as we know from reason and Revelation.[716]
e) To physical predetermination or premotion in the order of nature, there corresponds in the supernatural sphere the gratia efficax, which predetermines man to perform salutary acts in such wise that he acts freely but at the same time with metaphysical necessity (necessitate consequentiae, not consequentis). It would be a contradiction to say that efficacious grace given for the purpose of eliciting consent may co-exist with non-consent, i.e., may fail to elicit consent.[717] The will freely assents to the divine impulse because it is effectively moved thereto by grace. Consequently, efficacious grace does not derive its efficacy from the consent of the will; it is efficacious of itself and intrinsically (gratia efficax ab intrinseco sive per se).[718]
It follows that efficacious grace must be conceived as a praedeterminatio ad unum.[719]
f) If efficacious grace is intrinsically and of its very nature inseparably bound up with the consent of the will, it must differ essentially from merely sufficient grace (gratia mere sufficiens), which confers only the power to act (posse operari), not the act itself (actu operari). Efficacious grace, by its very definition, includes the free consent of the will, while merely sufficient grace lacks that consent, because with it, it would cease to be merely sufficient and would become efficacious.[720]