TWENTY FIRST LECTURE
1. We should like now to examine the problem of divine influence on the human will in the case of bad human actions.
In this regard we have to distinguish two categories of divine influence or activation: a conditional or not infallibly efficacious influence; and an unconditional one.
The conditional divine influence gives to man thepower of well doing, or moves him toward the good, on the condition that man does not introduce through his own deficient initiative (in not considering the rule) a moment of nothingness in the dynamism of his will. Thus this conditional influence involves the permission that man does evil if he takes the -- purely negative -- initiative of "nihilating".
If this initiative is taken, the conditional divine influence is made sterile, does not arrive at fruition, nor does it bear the fruit which would have been the good action.
If this deficient initiative is not taken, then divine influence, not having been stopped, pushes along to fruition; the conditional activation fructifies by itself into unconditional or infallibly efficacious influence.
Conditional influence corresponds to "antecedent" divine will; unconditional influence, to "consequent" divine will.
But it is to be noted that the fact of not introducing nothingness in the dynamism of the will, or of nottaking the initiative of escaping from or making sterile the divine influence, is not to do something; there is here no actoin, no positive act of consent, no merit. The only thing is that man endures -- without moving -- open to divine action. Thus man is able to make inefficacious, he is not able to make efficacious, divine influence. Divine influence -- if it has not been previously drendered sterile -- is efficacious by itself. Through itself alone the creature is capable of demerit, not of merit. It really merits as well as it really causes, but in so far as it is a secondary agent.
2. God knows evil by mans of the good of which evil is the privation, and he knows in creatures actually existing the negations and privations the first initiative of which creatures are freely taking. Thus evil is known in the creatures, which are themselves known in divine essence.
There is no impossibility in assuming that the spectacle of things is in this way -- negatively -- determined by creatures in so far as this spectacle involves lack of being, negations and privations originating in created free will. Because 1st) any created objects whatsoever are only termini materially attained, not specificating, in regard to divine intelligence; 2nd) that which human free will introduces, in so far as it is first cause of evil, is not any object, but rather an absence of object.
3. Divine plan is not a scenario written at a previous time, which would later by performed by creatures; it is simultaneous, just as eternity itself, with every moment of time; and thus the will and the permission of God eternally determine this eternal plan with regard to the actual exercise of human free will, in so far as free will does or does not by its own deficient first initiative fail divine action.
4. The possibility of failing is necessarily involved in every created freedom, to the extent that nature alone is considered; because that agent only is naturally impeccable whose rule is its very power and action, (such an agent is the uncreated agent.) Therefore we have the following implicatioins: if God will communicate to another being, by graace, His very life and beatitude, there must necessarily be love of friendship between God and His creature; if love of friendship is to exist between God and His creature, such a crature must necessarily be endowed with intelligence and freedom; if a creature is to be endowed with freedom, it must necessarily be endowed with a freedom naturally capable of failure. Thus the possibility of evil is the ransom of the possibility, given to the creature, of entering into the very joy and glory of God.