My first intention in the present essay is to show the humanistic religious root of Fransico Suárez' Scientia Conditionata and the focal point of his disagreement with protestantism. My second intention is to outline a Reformational theory of modality that rejects such of a theory of possible worlds as proposed by Suárez.

Although the Scientia Media of Luis de Molina--formulated prior to the Scientia Conditionata--and the Scientia Conditionata itself are a Jesuit response to Lutheran theology, I believe that Calvinist theology, or more properly Reformed theology, would have been yet more difficult for Molina and Suárez to attack on the points that concern grace, perdestination and free will. In effect, the language and philosophical character of Luther (who from start to finish was of the school of Occam, as he himself always admitted) still carried along a view of divine intervention in human affairs, overly laden with quasi-Aristotelian distinctions. This manner of talking doesn't appear in Calvin, who successfully broke with all scholastic Roman Catholicism.

The present exercise consists in showing the focal point of the disagreement between the Suarezian ontology of Scientia Conditionata and Reformed theology, displaying the humanistic religious root of the former and its clash with the pure Christian religious motif, as the Reformation understands it. Incidentally, this exercise will illustrate by means of an important example, the thesis that ontological theories indeed have in addition a motivation and root of a religious character. I also hope to offer an answer to a puzzle that Guillermo Hurtado has proposed. The puzzle is this: How is it possible that Roman Catholicism abandoned the grand philosophical endeavor of the Counter-Reformation, whose principal exponent is, without a doubt, Francisco Suárez, to return to the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas? How is it possible that Pope Leo XIII proclaimed the Thomistic philosophy to be the official philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church when the Council of Trent itself was dominated by Jesuit theology? The answer, aparently, is that Suárez is too "modern," in the sense that his philosophy is too rooted in the humanistic religious motive of the autonomy of freedom. This motif clashes essentially with the basic Roman Catholic motif of nature and grace, whose greatest exponent--without a doubt--is Thomas Aquinas.

Realizing the modern spirit of Suárez, Jose Ferrater Mora (1953) made a great effort to show in what his aforementioned modern spirit consists. On my view, Ferrater Mora never manages to see in what the spirit of modernity consists, although he recognizes that this spirit is somewhat different from the medieval, including the intermediate spirit of the Renaissance[1]. The modern spirit is a affirmation of the humanistic religious motif of liberty, which is still found mingled during the Renaissance with the Christian motif, as with Erasmus of Rotterdam, above all in his Biblical humanism.

As Bonet (1932), Copleston (1985) and Abellan (1992) have shown, there is no doubt that the humanistic motif of the autonomy of freedom is one of the great well-springs of the Jesuit Counter-Reformation and of the thinking of Molina and Suárez, in particular, as it comes through Erasmus. According to Copleston,

It is quite clear that Molina and those who agreed with him were concerned to safeguard the freedom of the human will. Their point of view may perhaps be expressed by saying that we start from what is best known to us, namely human freedom, and that we must explain the divine foreknowledge and the action of grace in such a way that the freedom of the will is not explained away or tacitly denied. If it did not seem fanciful to introduce such considerations into a theological dispute, one might perhaps suggest that the general humanistic movement of the Renaissance was reflected to some extent in Molinism.[2]

Consequently, we will see the nature of the basic religious motif that gave life to not only the humanistic movement of the Renaissance, but also to all of modernity.

The defining religious motif of humanism, and finally of the modern spirit, is the autonomy of the will. This motif postulates that human freedom consists in an supposed capacity of man to generate his own moral norms and to make decisions with a foundation only in said norms, free of all external influence. In moral judgment, this implies the rejection of all authority outside of ones own reason, in particular the rejection of any so-called divine revelation.

Those called "Biblical Humanists" (like Erasmus of Rotterdam) did not see the anti-Christian consequences of the humanistic motif and it wasn't much later that humanism fell away from its Christian remnants to appear in all its purity. Biblical humanists wanted to make the autonomy of the will compatible with a separate attachment to the Gospels. In method, this is nothing foreign to the spirit that animated Scholasticism, according to which some revealed truths are also knowable through natural reason. It is possible to agree, as in effect St. Thomas does, that the demands of reason cannot contradict the demands of faith. Thus, reason ought to reach in principle the same moral precepts that the law revealed by God presents in Scripture.

But humanism has consequences much more profound when it tries to comprehend the extent of human corruption caused by the Fall. In effect, this is a principle point of disagreement between protestantism and Roman Catholicism. Within its quasi-Aristotelian philosophical anthropology, Roman Catholicism conceives of man as a material substance, endowed with matter and substantial form, but, in addition, originally endowed with the superadded gift of grace. That which man lost owing to sin is this superadded gift, but not the integrity of his nature. And the distinctive attribute of this nature is precisely this rational soul. Reason, then, has remained unharmed through the Fall. All the same, since reason is the medium through which man judges and understands Revelation, it follows that all men are equal in their capacity to understand and judge the Gospel. The equality of men in this respect is complemented in the encompassing bestowal of Grace upon everyone to the same degree (with the exception of a select group predestined to eternal life). It is for this reason that Thomas Aquinas is able to say that those who have been ordained to eternal life, not through divine predestination but through grace,

are said to be written in the book of life not absolutely, but conditionally, as consigned to it, not in order to obtain life in itself, but in its cause only. And these can be blotted out from the book of life.[3]

All those who have received their portion of grace can be removed from the book of life, if they do not persevere in good works. In this manner, for the great mass of humanity, salvation is a matter of their own capacity to maintain themselves in salvation through self-mortification and the doing of good deeds. This morality is the principle target of the Reformation, which insists that, if well there is a common grace for all humanity, this, by itself alone, is insufficient for salvation even though one can be led by it to a higher degree of morality.

The charge of the Reformation against Aquinas and Roman Catholicism in general is that they don't admit the seriousness of the Fall and they don't understand that the problem is not one of the ability to do good works. The person who is not born again is able to be very moral, and to have a definite goodness. But he has a fatal flaw: His heart, his integral being, is inclined, that is totally given over to a false god. This is the profound significance of original sin for the Reformation. Where the Reformation talks about total depravity, there is no desire to say that man would be entirely incapacitated for good works, but only such that his heart is entirely darkened and for this reason totally incapacitated for turning to God. An effective operation of the Holy Spirit on the heart or spirit of man is required in order that he be regenerated in a spiritual, not a moral, sense. Upon being regenerated, one is endowed with a new faith--the faith in Christ Jesus. And it is this faith that justifies man, not his good works. That is to say, God freely justifies man by giving him the gift of faith.

This view of man, as fallen and delivered over to darkness by virtue of original sin, is the principal target of Renaissance optimism. Christian humanists deny spiritual death and insist on what they call "free will". Consistent with the doctrine of free will, conversion is a matter of mere reason and, moreover, perseverance in salvation is a matter of the great rational and moral capacities that man independently possesses. Of course, this excludes the possibility that God Himself can intervene in human decisions. Humanism postulates an absolutely autonomous and inviolable internal sphere of decision making, exclusive of God Himself. Autonomous, because the norms that govern its actions are a product of its very own reason; inviolable because through its very own essence it cannot be free if it were unable to operate without being inclined in some direction by an external force. These two attributes of autonomy and inviolability implie the unpredictability of human action: It is impossible to know, at an instant t, the decision one has to make at a later time t', since the autonomy of the will naturally excludes the fact that the will should be subject to causality.

Nevertheless, if reason is not corrupted through sin, what prevents the ordinary person from seeing by himself alone the truth of the Christian Revelation and from making the final decision to accept or reject its moral demands? In this manner is preserved what is understood by 'liberty', namely the supposed capacity of man to decide by himself alone the fundamental demands of his own rationality without any external influence. This means human beings are always placed at a crossroad: at each moment they must choose between following the moral law as their own reason indicates or acting in conformity with other inclinations.

All the same, the Reformation does not deny that man should be morally responsible each moment of his life. What it denies, in the first place, is that the moral law is a product of ones reason, just as it conceives of supra-arbitrary social norms as laws which God has placed in His creation. In the second place, it denies that man is unable to be influenced in one direction or other. But above all it denies that the relevant issue for salvation could be an issue concerning moral character. Of course, the Reformation affirms that man can be influenced by God to act in one or another direction, but it denies that the foundation and substance of salvation consists in an inclination to action. Salvation is accomplished by God at the moment in which He inclines the heart of man, not to perform such and such moral action, but to worship and serve a new divinity--the God of Jacob through a new faith in Jesus Christ. Receiving the gift of faith and exercising it is no work or action, but the spontaneity of confidence in justification by faith through the merits of Jesus Christ. This divine gift--which is manifest in the fruits of good works--is irrevocable and leads inevitably to life eternal.

In its effort to combat the doctrine of justification by faith, the Counter-Reformation, led by Luis de Molina and Francisco Suárez, supported the humanistic religious motif to the extent of denying the Thomistic doctrine of Divine Assistance. That is to say, within the technical, scholastic way of speaking, Molina and Suárez denied the doctrine of physical pre-motion according to which "God assists in the production of man's free actions with assistance previously and physically determined."[4]

This is not a very clear doctrine. Certainly the idea that in God all things have their existence is scriptural (Colossians 1:17). Within the Aristotelian-Thomistic conceptual framework, such an idea is expressed through the concepts of prime mover (or first cause) and secondary causes. The prime mover is he who maintains, by his power, all the things in existence. In particular, the actions of man--actions which are entities in one of the categories--must be sustained by the first cause. The Thomists understood this as signifying that God gives an influence, impression or transient movement that procedes from God and is received by the creature. According to Abellan, the characteristics of this influence are the following:

1. It is a physical assistance: "It acts like an efficient cause, and not only moral or final, in the way that God would direct one with commands or persuasions."[5]

2. It is an immediate assistance: "God is not only the author of the potential of creatures to act, in order to allow them to act on their own later, but also He assists directly in the actuation of a potential and in the production of the effect."[6]

3. It is a prior assistance: "It is produced anterior to or prior to one's nature, understanding by this the natural dependency of the effect with respect to the cause; therefore, such prioricity is not ever understood in a temporal or chronological sense of divine influence with respect to free human actions."[7]

This doctrine is better understood by means of the Thomistic distinction between knowledge by vision, and knowledge by simple understanding. By the former "is understood the knowledge that God has of the matters of fact that have existed, exist now, or will exist." By the latter is understood the knowledge that God has of the merely possible, that is to say, "Those matters of fact that might exist, but that never shall exist since the conditions necessary for them are not given."[9] According to Domingo Bañez, the Thomist defender of this doctrine in the 16th century, the connection that exists between a merely possible event and its conditions, as well as the occurence or non-occurrence of such conditions, is the result of a decree of God. For example, God, in the first place, decrees this conditional:

and moreover, He decrees that Peter should be placed (or not ) in the conditions C1...,Cn . The truth of the conditional depends precisely on the efficacy of divine assistance, which would move Peter to act in the manner stipulated the moment that the conditions are fulfilled. In other words, according to the Bañez-ian Thomists, the conditionals--whether counterfactuals or not--are true by decree of the will of God.

Martin Luther would have no problem with the thesis that conditionals are true by a decree of God's will. The point of difference with the Bañez-ians is that according to them, from the necessity of the conditional, the necessity of the consequent does not follow. According to Luther, on the contrary, it does so follow. For Luther--as related by Bonet--,

The expressed distinction [between the necessity of the conditional and that of the consequent] reduces, perhaps, to saying: All things come to be necessarily, except God. The necessity of the consequence is admitted by all. Well then, that is sufficient to destroy freedom. Apart from that, the non-necessity of the consequent serves no purpose, posited that the deed ought to be realized of necessity. Moreover, the non-necessity of the consequent is merely an illusion, it is contradictory to the necessity of the consequence which the supporters of free will espouse. If God foresaw the betrayal of Judas, Judas will necessarily do the betrayal: So we have the necessity of the consequent: Contrary to this, they take comfort saying: Judas can change his mind since there is no necessity of the consequent. But how are these two propositions to be reconciled: Judas can desire not to betray, Judas necessarily desires to betray? They are contradictions![10]

One way of understanding what the Bañez-ians want to say when they insist--to the regret of all--that Judas could have failed to betray Jesus, would be that the betrayal is not essential to any other human being in circumstances analogous to those in which Iscariot was when he betrayed Jesus (as in effect is the case with the other apostles in parallel situations). Perhaps this was what the Bañez-ians understood when they spoke about potential but non-actual freedom.[11] In such a case the necessity operator would mean different things. According to Luther, 'It is necessary that Fa' means that God has decreed that a exists and has the property F, be it essential or not. Evidently, when Luther says it is necessary that Judas should have betrayed Jesus it means that God decreed this deed, which is a scriptural truth. For the Thomists it would mean that being a traitor is essential to Judas, or that he would not have the potential for not being one, which is evidently false, since to be a traitor is not an essential property of mankind.

In relating the weakness of the Thomist distinction between potential and actual freedom, as well as the strength of Luther's argument, Molina and Suárez thought up another strategy for opposing Luther's soteriology. The strategy consists, to put it simply, in denying that the conditionals that bring together human actions should be decreed necessary by God. This is the origin of Molina's middle knowledge, which was perfected by Francisco Suárez under the name of conditional knowledge. As Giannina Burlando describes it,

Conditional knowledge is prior to any fixing of God's decrees, for this reason it is said to be independent of the divine will, and dependent on the free choice of creatures. It has similarities and differences with the two canonical types of divine knowledge. Like knowledge by vision, the object of conditional knowledge is contingent, and like knowledge by simple understanding it is prior to divine decrees. But it differs from both, because by means of it, God sees by His essence, and ab eternitatis, not only the things that a free agent really will do and possibly could do, but also the things that he would do in the infinite circumstances in which he could be placed. More precisely, God has conditional knowledge only if He knows all true conditionals concerning future contingents.[12]

For example, according to Suárez, it is not the case that God has decreed the truth of this conditional:

This means, among other things, that the conditions C1...,Cn do not causally determine that Peter should deny Christ. According to Suárez, the conditions, C1...,Cn could be given, or any other conjunction of conditions, and even so Peter could fail to deny Christ. The conditions that would be given are unimportant, Peter has the ability to deny or not to deny Christ, equally. In other words, free will is perfectly unconditioned. God "sees" the truth of conditional (C) but not because there would be a law-like or causal connection between antecedent and consequent, or because divine assistance inclines Peter to act in one direction or another, but because He foresaw that Peter will simply and plainly do so. Suárez calls such conditionals "futuribles."

It is in this way, by attacking the Reformation, that Molina and Suárez attacked the Thomists simultaneously, giving way to a large controversy in Roman Catholicism that finally seems to have been resolved in favor of the latter, with the Thomistic philosophy being declared the official philosophy by Pope Leo XIII. The reason for this is obvious. The theory of Molina and Suárez gives free rein to the religious motif of the autonomy of the will. As Kant pointed out centuries later, this autonomy consists precisely in the supposed capacity that reason has for determining the will independently of the conditions in which the agent finds himself.

The Reformation completely rejects the thesis that human action is unconditioned. All human action obeys motivations and preferences that are ultimately rooted in the religious motif that governs a person. Put another way, human action is subject to the law of preferences: All human actions obey the preferences of the agent, which the actions realize. A very specific model that allows us to see how this law works is afforded by the theory of rational choice. At a time, t, an agent is presented a range of possible choices, X, and moreover this is endowed with a preference relation which is a binary relation over X that is usually supposed to be joint, reflexive and transitive ( although we don't have to assume that this is so). What is crucial is that the human agent has an order of preferences but neither has nor is able to have an order of preferences above the class of all orders of preferences, without circularity. That is to say such meta-ordering could not be made without reflecting its object-level ordering of preferences. The actual range of possible options, Bt, for the agent in t is restricted by the conditions in which he is found (presupposed restrictions or those arising from another ordering). The law of preference requires that the agent of the action should choose his most preferred action in Bt.

Of course, God in His omniscience, knows what the agent's preference ordering is and the inclinations of his heart down to the smallest detail. But not only this, God also is able to act directly on the heart of the agent to modify his range of preferences.[13] For this reason the Westminster Confession says:

Although God knows whatsoever may or can come to pass upon all supposed conditions, yet hath He not decreed anything because He foresaw it as future, or as that which would come to pass upon such conditions.[14]

It's much better to reverse things: Conditionals in general, and counterfactuals in particular, are true because God decreed their truth. This decree includes all the laws that direct the universe but not only these, it also includes His intervention in the heart of man when He so determines it in His sovereign will.[15] That is to say, God has placed a lawful order in His creation, an order that directs even human actions.

According to the Reformed concept of freedom, a person is free to act at a time t, IFF, he has the ability, actual and effective, of bringing to completion the action that maximizes his preferences in Bt, without external compulsion. For the Reformation, free will reduces to this: Surely, ordinary ways of speaking say that an agent is more free the larger Bt, that is the more options the agent has for choosing. It ought to say, a person has more options for choosing his actions the larger Bt is, without restrictions and external compulsions. But even in the extreme case in which Bt has two elements, one is free to choose that which maximizes his preferences.

In order to understand why the Reformation holds to the doctrine of total depravity, it is important to stress the role religion plays in the integration of the personality and the formation of preferences as well as the structure of action. According to the Reformation, the only works actually pleasing to God are those that arise by the love of God through faith in Christ. It is for this reason that "good works" which want of faith in Christ are lacking in all salvific value and in fact are called sin in Scripture.[16] For the Reformation, faith in Christ is the basic integrator of sanctified actions: Only actions born from the love of God have a non-sinful character.

John Searle, as well as Arthur Danto, have noted the "accordion effect" in the structure of action and have argued that it ought to produce "basic" actions within every action. The example Searle gives is the assasination of the Duke of Sarajevo by Gabriel Princip in 1914. According to Searle, a hierarchy of events can be distinguished, all associated with this action:

In the above hierarchy, we see that the events found outside the lines are not proper actions. The actions of Princip are found within the lines and we can note that the higher ones are in part constitutive of the lower ones. Danto (1965) argues that in every action there ought to be basic actions that are not composed of other more elemental actions. It is not the purpose of this article to discuss the plausibility of this thesis but to observe that in each case, there seems to be extremes in the structure of an action: In one extreme there are one or more basic actions that make up the action; in the other those which I call the integrators of the action. In Searle's example the integrator seems to be the desire to avenge Serbia on the part of Princip.

So it seems we are able to model the mereological structure of an action within a gradient whose smallest elements are basic actions and whose largest are integrators. According to this model an action is acceptable to God IFF its mereological gradient has a supreme element and this is an act of faith in Christ. In other words, an action is sanctified IFF it has a lone integrator and this is the action of glorifying God.[18] To sum up, only he who has received the gift of faith is able to perform sanctified actions. Saving grace consists in a subtle operation of the Holy Spirit on the heart, in virtue of which faith is bestowed and so capacities to perform sanctified actions--works of faith. To put it another way, it is grace that endows man with a certain order of preferences which occasionally is replaced by that of the old self, in virtue of which he wants to glorify God.

The foregoing conception of free will and grace has the consequence that there are no futuribles in the sense of Suárez. God decrees the truth of all true conditionals, including those that refer to the free actions of mankind. Bañez and the Thomists who lent their assistance in the controversy have reason to observe that conditionals, strictly speaking, are true, necessarily. But they err in supposing that the consequent does not have grounds to be necessarily true in general. In effect, why are conditionals necessary? The answer is none other than this: Because they are a result of a decree of God. But then, as I hope to show shortly, all that occurs, occurs after a necessary fashion. For that reason, let us consider the system T of modal logic,[19] with the symbol '|-' interpreted as it is a decree of God that. Then surely the Rule of Necessitation (N) is valid:

In effect, if God decrees that p then no one can prevent the occurrence of p, for which reason it is valid to say that is is a decree of God that p occurs necessarily.

Nevertheless, Bañez would have had to admit that, at the least, the initial conditions of creation are decreed by God and that everything that occurs, is given by antecedent conditions and is governed by conditionals. that is to say, if q occurs, then there is a conjunction of antecedent conditions, p, and a conditional p => q that yields q. Then, axiom A6 of T, namely,

which for this purpose is natural enough, implies that every consequent--that is every event--is necessary.

The following are some logical consequences of the foregoing:

1. God's knowledge by vision is an ultrafilter on a Boolean Algebra of all possible propositions. This means that p is true IFF p is in God's knowledge by vision.

2. In God's knowledge by vision, truth is equivalent to necessity and necessity is equivalent to possibility: p is true IFF p is possible and IFF p is necessary.

3. Ordinary concepts of possibility only reflect our ignorance, or properly, the distinction between essential and accidental properties of entities.

4. God does not play dice. For example, God sovereignly ordains the exact moment a determinate atom will emit its particles and orders them in the way in which they follow a "random" pattern. The situation here is analogous to the sovereign action of God on man's heart and we are reminded that He continually intervenes in His creation to sustain it (this is understood as divine providence). Newton always insisted that this was necessary to keep the quantity of physical energy in the universe constant. Leibniz was opposed to this arguing that having at one time created the universe, which is none other than the best of all possible worlds, God's action becomes unnecessary. But this ought not to surprise anyone, since Leibniz did not follow in vain the scientia media of Molina and Suárez.[20] In effect, the doctrine of scientia media eventually leads to that of possible worlds. But this is a theme we are unable to enter upon here.