Justified True Belief

(●) The Jesuit who proposed that God knows not only what we will do, but what we would have done in the lives we never lived. + Think about the last time you talked someone out of a decision. You knew your friend well enough to say, with real confidence, that if he took that job he would be miserable inside a year. You were not guessing at random. You know him, so you know how he would react to a situation he is never actually going to be in. And if he listened to you and turned the job down, notice what became of the thing you knew. It stayed true, and it stayed true about a life he never lived. Luis de Molina took that ordinary kind of knowing, scaled it up to infinity, and put it at the centre of a doctrine of providence, the Christian conviction that God governs everything that happens and that nothing in a life falls outside his care. God, he argued, knows what every person who could ever exist would freely choose in every situation that person could ever be placed in. God knew that before he decided which world to make. So God can plan a history down to its smallest detail, and still leave every human choice inside it genuinely free, because he is not pushing anyone. He is selecting, out of all the possible worlds, the one whose free choices he already saw. A possible world, in this way of talking, is not a planet somewhere else. It is a complete way things could have gone: this entire history, and every other entire history that might have run instead of it. The name for that knowing is scientia media, middle knowledge, so called because Molina set it between two kinds of divine knowledge the theologians already recognised (T2), and it made him the most argued-over Catholic theologian of his century. The Dominicans went to the Inquisition about it. Rome then spent nine years and dozens of formal sessions trying to settle whether it was heresy, and at the end of all that declined to decide. Four hundred years later the idea was rediscovered by Protestant philosophers who had barely heard his name, and it is now one of the live options in English-language philosophy of religion.

(●) 1535 AD: Born at Cuenca into money, and sent to Salamanca to read law. + Cuenca is a Castilian hill town of stone houses built out over a gorge, and in the 1530s it was prosperous on wool and cloth. Molina was born there in 1535, into a family with money. He learned his Latin at the cathedral school, and then went off to Salamanca, the great university of Spain, to study law: the standard road for a clever son of a good family who was expected to end up rich. He did not last long on that road. What broke the plan was reading, of all things, Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, the short manual of prayer and self-examination that the founder of the Jesuits had written for people trying to work out what God wanted of them. The Exercises do not argue with a reader. They give him instructions: put yourself inside the scene, watch what moves in you as you sit there, and ask what the movement means. Molina came out of it convinced that the money was a problem rather than a prize.

(●) 1553 AD: At eighteen he gave up the inheritance and entered the Society of Jesus. + He entered the Jesuit novitiate at Alcalá de Henares in 1553, taking the vow of poverty that settled the question of the family fortune. A novitiate is the trial period a man lives inside an order before anything is promised permanently: the order looks him over, and he finds out what he has walked into. The Society of Jesus was thirteen years old at the time, younger than he was, and it was in the middle of an expansion few religious orders have ever matched. In 1554 he was sent to Coimbra in Portugal, which was becoming the intellectual engine room of the order, and stayed there as a student of philosophy and then of theology. He took his master’s degree in 1558. So much of his life would be spent outside Spain: a Castilian who did his real work in Portuguese lecture halls, on a Portuguese king’s payroll, in a country whose ships were at that moment carrying the slave trade he would later spend nine disputations dissecting.

(●) 1563 AD: He began twenty years of lecturing, first on Aristotle and then through Aquinas line by line, in front of students who argued back. + From 1563 to 1567 Molina taught philosophy at Coimbra. Then, from 1568 to 1583, he held a chair of theology at Évora, the young Jesuit university that Cardinal Henry had founded in 1559. A chair is the professorship itself, the post with its subject attached, and holding one in theology meant that the whole of the subject was his to work through, year after year, in front of a room. For his first years at Évora his colleague was Pedro da Fonseca, a Portuguese Jesuit who had been lecturing publicly on providence and predestination since the mid-1560s and who was circling the same problem of divine knowledge. Predestination is God’s settling beforehand of who will be saved, and in the sixteenth century it was the question everyone was fighting about, Protestant and Catholic alike. The two men were never easy together, and the rivalry outlasted the overlap: Fonseca was gone from Évora by the early 1570s and posted to Rome from 1573, and by 1590 Molina was calling him his main enemy. The teaching was not lecturing in the modern sense. A theology chair in a sixteenth-century Catholic university worked through the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas a question at a time, and the classroom form was disputation: a thesis stated, objections raised at full strength by students whose job it was to break it, then the answer. Politeness was not the point of that room. A student who could not find the strongest objection to what his professor had just said was not doing his work. Every one of Molina’s books is built in that shape, which is why they read the way they do. The Concordia is not an essay with a thesis. It is a numbered sequence of fights. Those Évora lectures on the First Part of the Summa, the part that treats God and God’s knowledge, are where middle knowledge was worked out. He was still revising them when he left the classroom.

(●) 1588 AD: The Concordia appeared at Lisbon, and a Dominican at Salamanca set out to have it stopped. + The title is a promise: Liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia, the harmony of free choice with the gifts of grace, divine foreknowledge, providence, predestination and reprobation. Reprobation is the hard end of that list: God’s passing over, or rejection, of those who are finally lost. Molina was claiming to have reconciled the whole set, which is a very large thing to put on a title page. The Portuguese Inquisition licensed the book, and that should have settled it. Domingo Báñez, the Dominican who held the senior theology chair at Salamanca and who had been Teresa of Avila’s confessor, was not persuaded. He informed the Archduke Albert, then viceroy of Portugal, that the work carried propositions the Spanish Inquisition had already censured, and the sale of the book was stopped. It was cleared and went back on sale, and Molina answered the first round of objections in an appendix printed the following year. But the pattern of the next twenty years was set within months of publication, and it never really varied: a move against the book, a defence, a clearing, and then the next move. In 1590 the Spanish Inquisition set Báñez and Francisco Zumel to compiling a new Index of forbidden books, the list of what Catholics in Spain were not to read, and the two of them tried to get the Concordia onto it and failed. What made it personal as well as theological is that both men were defending a saint. Báñez was defending Aquinas as the Dominicans read him, with God moving the created will from within. Molina thought that reading made God the author of sin, and he said so.

(●) 1591 AD: He went home to Cuenca and spent the rest of his working life on law, money and the slave trade. + In 1591, after some years in Lisbon seeing the Concordia through the press and defending it, Molina was sent to the Jesuit college in the town he was born in. He was in his middle fifties, out of the university, and famous in a way he had not chosen. What he did with the time is the surprise of his career. A man reported to the Inquisition in his fifties might reasonably be expected to spend what was left of his life defending himself, and Molina did keep defending himself, but it is not what he mostly did. Instead of writing more on grace, he began De iustitia et iure, On Justice and Right: six enormous volumes on contracts, interest, taxation, wages, monopolies, currency exchange and property. It is where his reputation as an economist comes from. He argued that a just price is not a figure a theologian can calculate but the common estimation that buyers and sellers arrive at between them, which is to say the going rate, whatever the thing actually fetches when the people who want it and the people who have it meet. And he argued that fixing prices by decree simply drives the goods away. He also devoted nine disputations to the Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans and Asians, region by region, in one of the most detailed treatments any moral theologian of the century gave it. He was not working in an archive. He was working in a country whose fortune came from that trade, and he named the merchants’ excuses one by one.

(●) 1594 AD: Rome silenced both sides and took the quarrel into its own hands. + By the early 1590s the argument had stopped being an argument and become a public spectacle. Jesuits and Dominicans were staging rival defences in Valladolid, and memorials were flying to Madrid and to Rome from both orders. A memorial was the formal written petition by which a body of men laid its case before a prince or a pope, and both orders had men who could write them all day. In 1594 Rome imposed silence on both parties and announced that it would settle the matter itself. The machinery that followed was extraordinary. A commission of theologians examined the Concordia and in March 1598 recommended condemning it, which ought to have been the end of Molina. It was not, because Clement VIII was unhappy at how fast they had moved on a question of that size, and he sent them back to do it again. The two orders were then brought in to argue it out face to face before the cardinals of the commission, and the pace says something about what Rome thought was at stake: in 1601 alone the parties argued through thirty-seven sessions. From 1602 the pope himself presided. Middle knowledge got its own hearings in 1604, predestination in 1605. These were the Congregatio de Auxiliis, the congregations on the helps of grace, the auxilia being the assistance God gives a will so that it turns to him, and for nine years the most senior court in the Western church tried to decide whether a Spanish professor’s account of how grace works was Catholic. It never decided. On 5 September 1607 Paul V’s ruling went to both orders: each might teach its own position, neither might call the other heretical, and the case was simply closed.

(●) 1600 AD: He died in Madrid with the verdict still seven years away. + In 1600 Molina was called from Cuenca to take the chair of moral theology at the newly founded Jesuit college in Madrid. He held it less than half a year. He died on 12 October 1600, at sixty-five. Báñez outlived him by four years and died in October 1604, also before the ruling. The two men who had spent a generation in each other’s margins both went to their graves without knowing how Rome would come down, and the answer, when it came, was that Rome would not come down at all. Neither had won, and neither had been condemned. Both positions were permitted, which was in practice a victory for Molina, since he had been the one under investigation. His later volumes were still being printed nine years after his funeral, finished by other hands.

What He Taught

(T1) A choice is free only if, with everything else exactly the same, the person could have chosen otherwise. + Stand in front of the open fridge at eleven at night. There is one slice of pie left over, and you take it. Molina’s claim is that your taking it was free only if, with your hunger exactly what it was, your tiredness exactly what it was, your intentions about tomorrow exactly what they were, and God’s help to you exactly what it was, you could still have shut the door and gone to bed. Not "you would have refused if you had wanted to more." With everything the same, including what you wanted, you could have gone either way. Everything else in his system is built on that one definition, which is why he sets it down at the front of the book and takes such care over the wording. Philosophers call this libertarian freedom, and the word has nothing to do with politics. It means freedom that requires a genuinely open alternative, as against compatibilist freedom, which says you are free whenever you act from your own desires without external compulsion, even if those desires themselves could only ever have produced one outcome. On the compatibilist account the pie was always going to be eaten, and you ate it freely because nobody forced your hand. You might well think that is freedom enough. Most people, asked at the fridge door, would say that nobody made them do anything and leave it there. Molina thought it was not enough to make a person answerable for what he had done, and he thought Scripture’s warnings and pleadings assume the stronger kind of freedom. This is exactly where many Christians will part company with him, and they have always had a case to make: Augustine, Luther and Calvin all held that a will can be genuinely a will and still be unable to choose otherwise. Molina knew he was contradicting them. He built the rest of his system to show that the stronger freedom does not cost God any of his sovereignty (T2, T3).

(Q) "That agent is called free who, with all the prerequisites for acting having been posited, is able to act and able not to act, or is able to do one thing in such a way that he is also able to do some contrary thing." + Source: Molina, Concordia, part I, disputation 2, section 3, in Alfred Freddoso’s translation, quoted in his encyclopedia article on Molina. "All the prerequisites for acting having been posited" is the load-bearing phrase. It is scholastic language, the precise technical vocabulary of the medieval schools in which every theologian of Molina’s day was trained, and to posit a thing is simply to lay it down as given. So the phrase means: everything needed for the act is in place, the stage is fully set, nothing further is waiting to arrive. Even then, says Molina, the agent can go either way. That is the strongest definition of freedom available in the tradition, and he states it at the front of the book as the thing he refuses to give up.

(T2) Between what God knows by his own nature and what he knows by his own decision lies a third kind, middle knowledge: what anyone would freely do in any situation. + Here is the idea Molina is remembered for, and the cleanest way in is a story he did not have to invent, because it is in 1 Samuel. David is hiding in the walled town of Keilah. Saul is hunting him, and a walled town is a splendid place to be cornered in. David asks God two questions, and gets two answers: will Saul come down, and will the men of Keilah hand me over? Yes, and yes. So David leaves, and neither thing happens. Saul never besieges Keilah; the men of Keilah never betray anybody. God had just told David, truly, what free people would have done in a situation that never came about. "Then David said, Will the men of Keilah surrender me and my men into the hand of Saul? And the Lord said, They will surrender you." (1 Samuel 23:12) A statement of that kind is called a counterfactual: an "if this, then that" about something that did not in fact happen. You make them all day without the word. If I had left ten minutes earlier I would have caught the train. If she had been told, she would have come. Jesus uses one about whole cities. If the mighty works done in Chorazin and Bethsaida had been done in Tyre and Sidon, he says, "they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes" (Matthew 11:21). Not could have. Would have. Molina’s move was to slot that kind of knowledge into a sequence. Theologians had long distinguished two kinds of knowledge in God. First, natural knowledge: everything that could be, all the possibilities, all the necessary truths, which God knows just by being God and could not have been otherwise. Second, free knowledge: everything that will actually be, which God knows because he decided to create this world rather than another. The first is knowledge God could not have lacked, whatever he had decided; the second is knowledge he has precisely because of what he decided. Molina added a third and set it between the other two, calling it middle knowledge, scientia media, because it sits in the middle: everything that would be, every "if Peter were in that courtyard, he would deny me three times." The placement is the whole argument. Middle knowledge comes before God’s decision to create, so God can use it when choosing which world to make. It does not come from God’s decision, so it does not determine anybody. Hold both halves of that at once and the system falls into place. God looks over the whole range of possible people in possible circumstances, sees how each would freely respond, and creates the arrangement whose free responses add up to the history he intends. Nobody is pushed. Everything is planned.

(Q) "Finally, the third type is middle knowledge, by which, in virtue of the most profound and inscrutable comprehension of each faculty of free choice, He saw in His own essence what each such faculty would do with its innate freedom were it to be placed in this or in that or, indeed, in infinitely many orders of things." + Source: Molina, Concordia, part IV, disputation 52, section 9 (Freddoso translation, page 168). A faculty, in this vocabulary, is a power a creature has. Sight is a faculty and hearing is a faculty, and the faculty of free choice is the will, the power by which a person settles on one thing rather than another. Molina’s sentence carries on past where the quotation stops, and the tail matters: he adds that each such faculty "would really be able, if it so willed, to do the opposite." He is guarding against the obvious misreading, which is the one most readers make in the first minute. God’s seeing what you would do does not mean you were only ever going to do it. "In His own essence" is doing quiet work too. Molina is not saying God learns anything from outside himself, as though the creatures reported in. He holds that God knows created wills by knowing himself, with a depth of comprehension that reaches all the way through what a will is (T1).

(T3) God acts in every human act without doing any of the acting for us. + Nobody in this argument thought human beings act on their own. The whole tradition holds that no creature does anything at all without God’s sustaining and acting alongside it, a doctrine called divine concurrence: God concurs, that is, runs together with, every cause in the world, so that if he withdrew for an instant nothing would happen anywhere. Molina and Báñez agreed about that completely, and their quarrel is narrower than it sounds. The fight was about how. The Dominican answer was physical premotion. God moves the will first, from inside, and the will then acts. The motion is applied to the faculty, which is to say to the will itself, the power by which a person chooses (T2), and it is infallibly effective: what God premoves a will to do, that will does. Báñez held this was the only account that kept God the first cause of everything. Molina answered that God does not act on the cause, he acts with the cause on the effect. The two influences meet in the result, not in the agent. And he had an image for it: two men dragging a boat up a beach. The boat’s whole motion comes from the first man and the boat’s whole motion comes from the second, and neither is the total cause of it, because at every instant each is moving the thing together with the other. God is not supplying one half of your choice and you the other half. The act is wholly yours and wholly his, "wholly and totally from each of them in its own order" (part II, disputation 25, section 19), yours in the order of particular causes, the ordinary run of things in which one creature acts upon another, and his in the order of the universal First Cause, the one on whom everything else depends for being able to cause anything at all. Paul’s way of putting it is the one Molina is trying to do justice to: "work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure" (Philippians 2:12-13). Two verbs, one act, and the apostle sees no difficulty at all.

(Q) "when two men are dragging a boat, the total motion comes from each of the men doing the dragging, but not from each as from a total cause of the motion, since each of them simultaneously effects, in conjunction with the other, each and every part of that same motion." + Source: Molina, Concordia, part II, disputation 26, section 15 (Freddoso translation). Molina is answering the objection that if God and the creature are both only partial causes, then the effect must be split between them, half divine and half human. You can see why someone would press that: partial cause, partial effect. His reply is that the dividedness is in the cause, not in the effect. The boat does not move halfway because of one man. It moves all the way because of both, at once, the whole distance.

(T4) The sin in a sinful act belongs to the creature, and never to God. + This is the point Molina cared about most, and it is the reason he thought the Dominican account had to be wrong rather than merely different. Think of the current in a wire. The current does not choose whether it runs a lamp or an electric chair; it carries whatever the circuit puts it to, and the wiring, not the current, is why the outcome is what it is. Molina’s claim is that God’s general concurrence is like that: it supplies the power for the act without specifying which act. His word for that is indifferent, which in this vocabulary has nothing to do with not caring. An indifferent cause is one that is not aimed at a particular outcome rather than another, the way the current is not aimed at the lamp. So if God’s concurrence is indifferent, as Molina held, then it does not decide which act follows, and the particular shape of a choice, upright or vicious, comes from the creature. God holds the murderer in being and enables the motion of his arm, and the murder is his and not God’s. Whereas, said Molina, if God premoves the will to this determinate act rather than that one (T3), and the act is a sin, it becomes very hard to see how the sin is not traced back to the one who applied the motion. He is pressing hard on James: "Let no one say when he is tempted, I am being tempted by God, for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one" (James 1:13). Dominican theologians did not accept the charge, and it is only fair to say why. They distinguished the physical act, which God causes, from the moral defect in it, which is a lack rather than a positive thing and so needs no cause at all: God gives the motion, the creature supplies the crookedness, as a man with a limp supplies the limp and not the walking. Whether that distinction holds is one of the oldest unfinished arguments in theology, and it was not finished in 1607.

(Q) "the whole action in question is from God and the whole action is from free choice, nonetheless the viciousness and deformity of that action is attributed not to God but to created free choice." + Source: Molina, Concordia, part II, disputation 32, section 1 (Freddoso translation). The disputation is headed "The reason is explained why it is not God but created free choice alone which is the cause of sin," and Molina opens by admitting that Catholics all agree on the conclusion and are asking only for the explanation. Nobody on either side needed persuading that God is not the author of sin. What they wanted was an account of how that can be so while God is still at work in every act, and he spends the disputation supplying one, convinced that his account of concurrence is the only thing that makes it work (T3).

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Dominicans said he had made God a spectator, and Rome refused to settle it. + Báñez’s objection was not that middle knowledge is unscriptural. It was that it makes God dependent. On Molina’s account, what God knows by middle knowledge is not up to God: he did not decide that Peter would deny him in that courtyard, he found it to be so and planned around it. To the Dominicans that turned the sovereign Lord into the best-informed player at the table, working with facts he had to accept, and it is a serious objection rather than a piece of order rivalry. Grace, they said, would then be effective because the sinner consented, and the glory of a conversion would divide. Molina’s reply was that nothing whatever exists or happens apart from God’s permission and concurrence (T3), that God’s choice of which world to create is entirely free, and that a God who can hit his purposes without overriding a single will is greater, not smaller, than one who has to push. Rome heard both cases at enormous length and declined to rule. The 1607 decision let each order keep teaching its own view and forbade either to brand the other heretical, and later popes repeated the ban on calling names. It is an unusual episode in church history and worth sitting with: the church treated this as a question on which serious Christians reading the same Scriptures may land in different places, which is roughly where it has stayed.

(†) Protestants who wanted both a sovereign God and a responsible sinner reached for his tool within a decade. + Jacobus Arminius, the Dutch pastor and professor whose name later attached to a whole wing of Protestant theology, owned a copy of the Antwerp 1595 Concordia, and his account of a divine knowledge standing between the necessary and the free runs in Molina’s tracks closely enough that scholars now argue over whether Arminius should be called a Protestant Molinist. However that is settled, the historical point is solid: a Jesuit’s solution crossed the confessional line inside ten years, into the hands of men who agreed with him about almost nothing else. Reformed theologians pushed back exactly where the Dominicans had, and for the same reason. Francis Turretin, whose Institutes of Elenctic Theology trained generations of Reformed pastors (elenctic simply means argued out against opponents, objection by objection, which tells you what sort of book it is), rejected middle knowledge outright and noted in passing that other Jesuits, Pedro da Fonseca and Leonardus Lessius, had a claim on the idea alongside Molina. That is the shape of his reception for three centuries: a doctrine borrowed across every line in Western Christianity and refused across every line too.

(†) The twentieth century rediscovered middle knowledge, largely by accident, and put it to work on the problem of evil. + In 1974 Alvin Plantinga published The Nature of Necessity, containing the free will defence: the argument that God’s existence is not logically inconsistent with evil, because it may not have been within God’s power to create free creatures who always choose rightly. That sounds like a strange thing to say about an almighty God until you see what it runs on. The machinery of the defence is counterfactuals of creaturely freedom, the very statements Molina had made the object of middle knowledge (T2): if God will not make a free creature choose, then whether a world of free creatures who never sin was ever available to him depends on how those creatures would freely have gone. Plantinga appears to have worked it out without knowing that a Spanish Jesuit had got there in 1588. Since then the recovery has been deliberate. Thomas Flint’s Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (1998) set out the full system in analytic form. William Lane Craig has used middle knowledge on questions Molina never faced, among them what becomes of those who never hear the gospel: if God knows what each person would do under any conditions, the objection that someone was lost by an accident of geography loses its force. And the text itself came within reach of people who read no Latin, because Alfred Freddoso’s 1988 translation of part IV of the Concordia put the middle-knowledge disputations into English for the first time, and they have been read in it ever since. The standing objection is now called the grounding objection, and Báñez raised its substance first. Before God makes Peter, and before Peter exists to choose anything, what makes it true that Peter would deny Christ in that courtyard? Not Peter’s actual choice, since there is none yet. Not God’s decree, since middle knowledge is supposed to come before it. Robert Adams and William Hasker pressed the question hard in the 1970s and 1980s; Molina’s own answer was that God comprehends a created will so thoroughly that he sees how it would go, a depth of knowing he called supercomprehension, comprehension that reaches further into a thing than the thing itself makes evident. Whether that is an answer or a restatement of the problem is still argued, and anyone recommending Molinism should say so.

(†) Where his own record falls short: he documented the cruelty of the slave trade in detail, and still defended slavery itself. + The honest entry in Molina’s ledger is not in the Concordia. It is in De iustitia et iure, where nine disputations treat the Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans and Asians. Give him what he is owed first, because it is considerable. He informed himself about the political structures and customs of one supplying region after another, in Africa and in Asia, and set out region by region how people were actually being acquired: by deception, by coercion, by raids dressed up as wars, with the buyers taking care not to ask. He held that the enslaved keep rights that belong to them as human beings, among them the right to marry, to make contracts, and in some circumstances to bring their owner into court. He asked when an enslaved person might lawfully escape. He apportioned blame among traders, officials and rulers, and he judged private traders culpable for their studied indifference to whether the people they bought had been enslaved justly. And then he stopped. He did not condemn slavery as an institution. He accepted the standard scholastic titles by which a person could be justly enslaved, a title being the legal ground that makes a claim good, the way a deed is what makes a house yours rather than merely lived in by you. Captivity in a just war was the chief of those titles, so that a trade he had just shown to be riddled with fraud kept a lawful door open at the far end of it. Bartolomé de las Casas, a generation earlier, had gone further on the enslavement of native Americans. Molina had the evidence in front of him, in more detail than almost anyone writing then, and drew the smaller conclusion.