In today’s theological world, the free will theodicy of hell reigns supreme. It was formulated in response to compelling objections to the retributive model of damnation which had dominated Western Christianity for over a millennia and a half and was made popular in the English-speaking world by C. S. Lewis.1 God does not directly punish the damned for their disobedience and iniquity; he permits the damned to freely reject his offer of forgiveness and mercy. In Lewis’s oft-quoted words:
Finally, it is objected that the ultimate loss of a single soul means the defeat of omnipotence. And so it does. In creating beings with free will, omnipotence from the outset submits to the possibility of such defeat. What you call defeat, I call miracle: for to make things which are not Itself, and thus to become, in a sense, capable of being resisted by its own handiwork, is the most astonishing and unimaginable of all the feats we attribute to the Deity. I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that the ghosts may not wish to come out of hell, in the vague fashion wherein an envious man “wishes” to be happy: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self-abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good. They enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.2
Lewis was not the first to formulate the free will defense of damnation, but he put it center stage within English-speaking Christianity and eventually beyond. Its popularity was cemented with the publication of his imaginative parable The Great Divorce. The damned are invited to take a bus ride to heaven and to remain there. All they need do is abandon their favorite sins. Tragically, most do not. The gates of hell are barred from the inside.
Note Lewis’s comment on divine omnipotence: God’s salvific will can be defeated by human rejection. Not even the Almighty Creator can effect the free conversion of sinners. As we saw in our previous article, St Augustine of Hippo flatly rejects this contention. Because God is unlimited in his power, he possesses the competence to bring about all logically possible events, including the free actions of his rational creatures:
For the only true reasons why he is called almighty are that he can do whatever he wills, and that the effectiveness of the will of the Almighty is not impeded by the will of any creature whatsoever. (Ench. 96)
The implication is obvious: If God had wanted to save all, he could easily accomplish this eschatological end. But he does not—hence hell.
We now turn to the great scholastic theologian St Thomas Aquinas. In his analysis of Thomas’s reflections on eternal damnation, Roberto De La Noval begins his affirmation of the classical Christian understanding of divinity: God is simple, infinite, impassible, immutable, eternal, omnipotent, omniscient. Thomas concurs with Augustine’s assertion of divine omnipotence and offers a bit of metaphysical reflection in support:
The divine being, on which the notion of divine power is founded is infinite existence, not limited to any kind of being, but holding within itself and anticipating the perfection of the whole of existence. Whatever can have the nature of being falls within the range of things that are absolutely possible, and it is with respect to these that God is called all-powerful. (ST I.25.3)
Since, then, the will of God is the universal cause of all things, it is impossible that the divine will should not produce its effect. (ST I.19.6.)
And just as by moving natural causes he does not prevent their actions from being natural, so by moving voluntary causes he does not deprive their actions of being voluntary; but rather is he the cause of this very thing in them, for he operates in each thing according to its own nature. (ST 83.1)
Given that every free volitional act partakes of being, the omnipotent will of the transcendent Creator cannot be ultimately frustrated. If God wills that a specific person should freely do x, then x will happen. If God wills the salvation of some (or all), so it will and must be. This is a necessary entailment of his illimited power. God does not try, he does.
Somewhat surprisingly, Noval does not focus attention on the divine omnipotence. Instead he directs the reader to Thomas’s understanding of the divine attribute of omniscience. Specifically, he asks, does God know future contingents? Or to put it differently, Does God previse what will happen tomorrow, and if so, how?
The free will theodicy of hell presupposes that God cannot and does not bring about the free actions of human beings. This is why God is not responsible for the eternal damnation of the impenitent. God is impotent before our final rejection. He does not damn; we damn ourselves. Noval reasons, however, that if this is so, God should not be able to know what human beings will do in the future, at least not if God is who and what Thomas teaches him to be:
As is well known, Aquinas believes God to be omniscient as well as omnipotent. God knows all that can be known, including future contingents (future, that is, from the perspective of those within the realm of time). Whatever else lies within the category, certainly human free acts belong under the umbrella of future contingents. But here is where the problem arises: if God knows these acts, and if the free will theodicy’s assumption is true—that these free acts are truly outside of the domain of divine causality—then how does God know these acts? It follows necessarily that if God knows free acts that he does not cause, then God must be epistemically passive with respect to the free choices of human beings; the source of his knowledge is ultimately outside of him.1
That God should be epistemically passive in his knowledge of future contingents is, for Thomas, unthinkable. God is Ipse Actus Essendi subsistens, the subsistent act of being. He is not becoming, he is. As the infinite plenitude and actuality of being, he transcends all passive potency, including the potential to learn what human beings will freely do:
For Thomas, however, in God there is no passive potency at all, no capacity to be acted upon by another. Unlike human knowers, who are in an important respect moved to understanding and so altered by their knowing, God is not changed or enriched by knowing; learning is not something God needs to do. And so Aquinas upholds the lofty claim that in God, knowing involves no passion but is instead wholly causal: God knows all things by causing them; God knows all things by knowing himself; and God does not know any creaturely reality that he does not create. And among the “all things” that can be known are human free actions, for they are not nothing.3
How then does God know future contingents? Not by foreseeing them before they have happened. That would entail fatalistic determinism. The actions of human beings would be dictated by the future. I will do tomorrow what God infallibly knows I will do. Human freedom is thus an illusion. In the sixth century, the Roman philosopher Boethius saw the problem and proposed a solution that has powerfully influenced subsequent philosophical reflection. All of history, all that has happened and will happen, is available to the divine gaze in an eternal now. God does not see events before they happen; he sees them simultaneously happening as they are happening. God knows created reality in a single eternal moment. Let’s call this the timeless perception model. The problem posed to divine omniscience is therefore resolved.
Yet the Boethian solution also entails a problem: it locks God into a position of passive knowing because his creation of the world is logically prior to his knowing of the world. In his eternal gaze, he apprehends the entirety of history in a single atemporal glance; but as a result he is now incapable of providentially ordering, correcting, redeeming, and directing the history that he launched. There are no redos. God remains helpless before the libertarian freedom he has granted human beings. He stands on the mountain top and watches us live out our murder, treachery, and sin; but how does he now effectively exercise his divine providence? His impassibility precludes him from reacting to the events he witnesses, and his immutability precludes him from changing history and thereby altering his knowledge of the world.
Consider, for example, the case of the nefarious Professor Smith. While visiting his disabled mother, he notices her handicapped parking hangtag lying on her dresser table. While she’s not looking, he slips it into his pocket. God sees this happen as it happens, but constrained both by his timeless perspective and the creaturely freedom he is self-sworn to preserve, he is unable to incorporate his knowledge of Smith’s misdeed into his divine plans. As philosopher Hugh McCann astutely analyzes:
In order to wield effective control over the course of history, God has to know as creator how the decisions and actions of creatures with libertarian freedom will go. Only then can he arrange the progression of events in such a way to take full account of our behavior in achieving his ends. God may intend, for example, that Smith’s mother not be greatly inconvenienced by her disability, and so may be disposed to do something to compensate for Smith’s misdeed. If he is timeless, however, he cannot wait to see what Smith does and then react. Only a temporal God can do that. A timeless one must provide for this contingency “from eternity”: he must undo the damage as part of the one act in which he creates the entire universe—or perhaps we should say, as much of the universe as Smith’s freedom allows him to create. And it is hard to see how God can do this effectively if, as creator, he is in the dark as to what Smith will do. He could, of course, set up some insurance—say, by arranging for Mrs. Smith to have a spare parking permit. But he cannot, at least with any semblance of economy, insure against any and every rotten trick her son might come up with, not to mention the potential misdeeds of the thousands of other villains who could do her harm. Indeed, the countless opportunities free creatures have to exercise their freedom, the complexities of their possible interaction, and the immensely varied consequences of their actions might have would seem to offer next to no hope of successful prediction, thus leaving the Boethian God in a hopeless position from which to exercise meaningful providence over the world. Still less can we see how such a God would be able to do things like answer prayer, or empower his spokespersons to make accurate prophecies of any future event on which human agency might impinge. While the Boethian position does well with the problem of omniscience, then, its implications concerning God’s power and sovereignty are completely disappointing.5
As far as I know, Thomas does not mention this problem with the Timeless Perceptual Model in his writings; nonetheless he advanced its solution: God knows history through his act of creation; he knows what he does, and he knows what he does by knowing himself as the doer. In other words, God’s knowledge of the world is causal. Brian Shanley explains:
God knows future contingents precisely as their eternal cause. When Aquinas asserts that the eternal God has an epistemic access to all temporal events analogous to the kind of cognitive access that we have in ideal conditions to events temporally present to us, the ground of this epistemic presence is God’s creative causality. God knows all temporal events in their real existence because God is the cause of that existence; temporal events are present to God’s eternal knowledge as the object or terminus of God’s eternal creative causality. My central claim is that God’s creative-causal relationship to the world is the ultimate metaphysical foundation for all that Aquinas says about God’s knowledge of future contingents. God knows the future because God is its eternal creator.6
God knows all that is, including what from our perspective we call the future, by having created everything that is in one eternal act. But the past tense of the previous sentence is misleading as it puts God in time. It would be less misleading to speak of the divine act of creation in the present tense: God knows the cosmos and everything in it through his one eternal act of creating. He is not a passive observer of an already existent cosmos; he is actively creating the cosmos and thus knows the cosmos. As David Burrell aphoristically states: “God knows what God does.”7 But we must also say that God creates cosmos through his knowing of himself. History does not unfold before him as it does for temporal creatures. In one eternal act God is bringing history as a whole into reality. And like an artist, he knows what he is making. Yet unlike the human artist, he knows the object of his knowing not from the object itself but from his knowledge of the divine essence. “But God Himself is through His essence the cause of being for other things,” Thomas explains. “Since He has a most full knowledge of His essence, we must posit that God also knows other things” (SCG I.49.2). God’s knowing and acting are identical:
It is vital to notice that ingredient in the causal-practical model is the idea that the divine intellect’s relationship to the world is the obverse of our own: whereas our knowledge passively presupposes the existence of its object and is measured by it, God’s causal knowledge actively precedes and measures what it knows. God’s knowledge of the world is independent of any causal determination by what is known. While our intellects are passively assimilated to what we know, God’s intellect actively assimilates what is known to itself by causing things to be in imitation of the divine essence. God does not know things because they are, but rather things are because they are creatively known by him.8
Whereas human knowers know the world by taking the world into themselves, God knows the world by knowing himself. His knowing is his creating.
So why is any of this relevant to the question of free will theodicy. Recall Noval’s point: God is pure act. He lacks all passive potentiality. Consequently, he does not learn what is happening in his world, nor does he respond to events as we temporal beings do. That is what his impassibility means. If God does not cause free acts, he must acquire knowledge about them. There is no middle term here; the middle is excluded in two exhaustive options. If the free actions of human beings are outside of God’s creative activity, then he can only know them passively as they impress themselves upon his consciousness, just as it is the case with finite knowers.9 This is only possible, however, if his impassibility and immutability are denied. In other words, free will theodicy contradicts the classical Christian understanding of divinity.
“It appears that God must be the cause of human free choices,” concludes Noval, “lest the doctrine of divine impassibility be contravened.”10
Footnotes
[1] See my article “How Hot is Hell? The Retributive and Choice Models of Hell.” A case can be made that Eastern theology discovered the free-will defense of hell centuries, if not a millennium, before Western theology did. This topic is awaiting a dissertation.
[2] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940), chap. 8.
[3] Roberto De La Noval, “Pelagianism Redivivus: The Free Will Theodicy for Hell, Divine Transcendence, and the End of Classical Theism,” Modern Theology (2023): 11. https://doi.org/10.1111/moth.12894.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hugh McCann, Creation and the Sovereignty of God (2012), 81-82.
[6] Brian J. Shanley, “Aquinas on God’s Causal Knowledge,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 72 (1998): 451-452. See R. J. Matava, Divine Causality and Human Free Choice (2016), chap. 6. McCann also advances an innovative quasi-Thomistic causal proposal, 97-112. It should be noted that the causal understanding of God’s knowledge of the world is debated by Aquinas scholars. Cf. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity and God’s Knowledge,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 72 (1998): 439-445.
[7] David B. Burrell, Freedom and Creation in Three Traditions (1993), 107.
[8] Brian J. Shanley, “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 71 (1997): 212-213. Also see Brian J. Shanley, “Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 82 (1998): 99-122. “It cannot be said that what is known by God is the cause of his knowledge; for things are temporal and his knowledge is eternal, and what is temporal cannot be the cause of anything eternal. Similarly, it cannot be said that both are caused by one cause, because there can be nothing caused in God, seeing that he is whatever he has. Hence, there is left only one possibility: his knowledge is the cause of things.” Thomas Aquinas, De ver. 2.14.
[9] “Does this mean, as the Molinists would have it, that God’s knowledge which is the cause of all things is not the cause of future contingent things, or at least of the conditionally free acts of the future, and that here we have an exception to the principles regulating the divine knowledge in general? In this case we should have to say that the principle of causality admits of an exception, and we should have to maintain that the conditionally free acts of the future do not come from God, the First Being. Moreover, we should have to maintain that God’s knowledge is passive with regard to the conditionally free acts of the future, and that it is determined by them instead of determining them. Now there is nothing more absurd than to admit a passivity in pure Act. Finally, we should have to admit, as we shall see, that these conditionally free acts of the future have been all along infallibly determined of themselves, and this is the denial of freedom to these acts.” R. Garrigou-Lagrange, God: His Existence and His Nature (1936): II:72-73.
[10] Noval, 12.
Eclectic Orthodoxy 
The “non-causal” aspect of the act-of-pure-being profoundly changes theology, or ought so in any case. Without unrealized potential, without being acted upon, but rather always acting and acting upon, an act in which there’s a perfect coincidence of existence and essence, where the difference between knowing and doing and being does not obtain. I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.
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