Abstract

Traditionally, expositors have held that according to St. Thomas, no set of natural causes which are temporally prior to the will's act determines a free act of choice to one effect. We propose an alternative reading of Aquinas, arguing that God efficaciously and determinately governs creaturely free choices by way of the placement of the sum of natural causes, whose placement is sufficient of itself--impedible only by acts in the order of grace--to produce determinate acts of the will. We call this thesis theological compatibilism. ;We examine in detail Aquinas's teaching on the nature of the will, its acts, and the causes of those acts. We show how St. Thomas can be fruitfully interpreted as having held that ordinary Providence governs free choices efficaciously via the order of placement of natural causes. We claim that God wills the success which follows from the placement of these causes, while permitting the failure which He knows to be unavoidable if the complex natural order of finite beings is to be maintained. ;The will is free, on this account of St. Thomas's teaching, because it is able to move itself to whichever act the intellect judges as best, all-things-considered; it is able to move the intellect to judge in a way which conforms with the state of the will's appetites; and it is not necessitated by the union--accidental in itself--of natural causes which are jointly sufficient to move it to act. ;We argue that, according to St. Thomas, God manifests His independence from the natural order, while at the same time maintaining that order, by acting in the order of grace in a way which is consistent with the maintenance of the natural order. In this way, the effects of secondary causes are ultimately significant, and this is especially true of the actions of created free agents