Permission, Predestination, Peccability, Preterition, Predilection, Purgatory & ‘Pocatastasis

Báñezians, Molinists & others seem to tie themselves up in knots trying to coherently account for the conceptual compatibility of sufficient & efficacious graces, divine & creaturely freedoms, counterfactuals, permission to sin, predestination, impeccability, preterition, predilection, etc

It’s clear from reading their arguments that the repugnant implication they’re all most trying to avoid is any divine determination to hell, even for an unspecifiable greater good.

If we consider hell as merely purgatorial and then couple concepts like predestination, peccability, preterition, predilection & permission, along with sufficient & efficacious graces, all as ordered toward degrees of sanctity, friendship, contrition, Ignatian degrees of humility, infused contemplation, Bernardian love & intimacy, a major motivation to shrink from one or another of those competing accounts (e.g. Báñezian, Molinist) is removed.
The permission of sin for a greater good is intelligible in a way that the permission of hell could never be.

That God could but would not move each wo/man to his/her supernatural end infallibly is problematic (repugnant), while “that God could but would not move each wo/man to the highest degrees of holiness” is not.

A synergistic neo-Báñezian account could be coherent in terms of grace operating via shared agencies & interrelated intentions. We participate in wisdom by both descending movements, like those infused by grace (direct inspiration of the Spirit) or gifted by connaturality with things divine, as well as ascending movements of understanding, like cognitive & affective developments as can be fostered by being attentive, reasonable, intelligent, responsible & loving.

Simultaneous with receiving infused wisdom, the gift of the Holy Spirit, we must acquire a “wisdom of self- appropriation” & a wisdom that comes from gaining “insight into insight.”

Reinhard Hütter, in his review of _Before Truth: Lonergan, Aquinas, and the Problem of Wisdom_ by Jeremy D. Wilkins, writes: “We have to become competent, and becoming competent is not merely a mastery of material but also mastery of oneself as an observer, interpreter, judge, and agent. Becoming competent, measuring up, getting ready: this is the radical form of the problem ‘before truth’.

Hütter continues: “Lonergan argues and Wilkins forcefully and rightly reaffirms that the theologian is in need of both in order to become a faithful and authentic practitioner of Catholic theology.”

Simultaneous descending & ascending interior movements of these wisdoms, both infused & acquired, can continue in a journey that’s – not restless, but – restful, which will take us ever deeper (via epectasy) into the reality of love.

There’s no reason this rhythmic simultaneity would not persist eschatologically & would not have been essential protologically.

There’s no reason this dynamic would not be operative for all divine presences, even, both mediated & immediate. Even the peccability, which inheres in our epistemic distancing with the free choices & autonomous self-determination it affords us, may persist eschatologically as essential to those dynamics. That’s to say, too, that the ability to avert our beatific gaze could remain a metaphysical possibility (an ‘essential’ anthropological reality), while our impeccability would refer to a ‘practical’ inevitability.

We need to maintain – not that we, in essence, ‘couldn’t,’ but – that we clearly, in practice, ‘wouldn’t‘ avert our gaze.

Is that a difference without a distinction?

I think that, as long as we recognize the distinctions between freely assenting & a free absence of refusal, coupled with how we only ever freely follow our natural inclinations, a robust enough notion of freedom obtains.

It’s difficult to parse divine necessity & fittingness, nature & will. Made in the divine image, why should it be any easier to draw such distinctions for us???!!!

When Marcel Proust writes: “We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world,” because of our radical finitude, in some sense, this wisdom – journey goes on forever. 

At least, it comports with my Lonerganian approach. I like to explore the validity of the competing accounts using the implications I imagine each might have for the interior life. I incline toward those that are more synergistic, more mutual, more collaborative. That’s a good rubric, I believe, to judge any distinctions between acquired & infused prayer, virtue, etc There’s an integrality, a mutuality, a simultaneous synergic collaboration, a co-self-determinative dynamic, something the libertarian – compatabilist dichotomy doesn’t quite capture.

And I look for continuities between proto- , temporal & eschato – logics. That’s to say, if it operates in all domains, then it might well be essential & intended as a dynamic, not just permitted.

I like Proust’s journey of uniqueness b/c it resonates with how I conceive epectasy and a protological sub-eschatological Eden as well as our earthly sojourn.

*It may be more artful to refer to our finitude, our gnoseological fallibility, our unavoidable susceptibility to make mistakes, which are epistemic springboards to deeper meanings (e.g. mistakes as metaphors). Peccability would be an unavoidable meta-susceptibility (not inclination) to repeat mistakes by refusing to learn from them. This dynamic will change when well being’s no longer susceptible to ill being.