The Creator’s Decrees and Foreknowledge and the Creature’s Freedom of Will according to Domingo Báñez, Luis de Molina, and Bartolomeo Mastri

During the last decades of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries, one of the fiercest – and arguably decisive – disputes in the history of Western Thought took place: the debate, within Catholicism, on the solution of the ever lasting puzzle of the compossibility of divine omnipotent action and infallible omniscient foreknowledge, on the one hand, and the freedom of created wills, on the other. Báñez and the strict Thomists relied on the abyss of God's infinite power: God is so deeply mighty to determine the creatures to want freely what they freely want, they argued. Molina and the eclectic Thomists (following Ockham) relied on the abyss of God's infinite knowledge: God is so deeply intelligent to grasp what the creatures freely, i.e. autonomously, want, argued the latter. According to some 17th century Scotists, both the aforementioned solutions are ineffectual: the first fails to secure the possibility of what is normally meant with the expression “freedom of the will”; the second fails to secure God's omniscience. In order to find a solution, the Scotist, Giuseppe La Napola, developed an idea embryonically conceived by Duns Scotus. According to La Napola, the only viable solution consists in relying on the abyss of God's infinite freedom: God is so deeply free to be able to simulate in himself what the creatures would have wanted if they were not dependent on God; consequently, He can determine them to want precisely the outcome of that previous simulation. Bartolomeo Mastri analytically and thoroughly examined and disputed both the positions of the strict Thomists and of the eclectic Thomist, and elucidated and propounded La Napola's theory. This essay gives an account of the debate and takes stock of it.