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The Early Aquinas on the Question of Universal Salvation, or How a Knight May Choose Not to Ride His Horse
Author(s) -
Harkins Franklin T.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
new blackfriars
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1741-2005
pISSN - 0028-4289
DOI - 10.1111/nbfr.12064
Subject(s) - predestination , glory , philosophy , reading (process) , knight , statement (logic) , antecedent (behavioral psychology) , theology , order (exchange) , epistemology , psychology , social psychology , linguistics , physics , finance , astronomy , optics , economics
Abstract This article considers how the young Thomas Aquinas treats the question of universal salvation by examining his reading of 1 Timothy 2.4, God wills that all humans should be saved , in two of his early works, the Scriptum on the Sentences of Peter Lombard and the sixth Disputed Question on Truth , both dated to the period 1252–1257. Drawing on John Damascene's distinction between God's antecedent and consequent will, Thomas here teaches that whereas God wills antecedently in a unimodal way that all humans should be saved, He wills consequently in a bimodal way based on foreknown merits. Though foreknown merits are not a cause of predestination itself, they are a cause of glory, one of predestination's temporal effects. On Thomas's account, then, reading 1 Tim 2.4 as a straightforward statement of what God has done eternally—namely, predestine or save every individual human—would undermine the freedom of the human will that is necessary in order to attain to beatitude.