I admit it seems to be somewhat true; the more we look for the Enlightenment, the more we find it everywhere. But don’t despair; we’ve covered a lot since St. Thomas Aquinas and have now arrived at 1600 or so on our way to the Enlightenment and beyond.
Still in the midst of the Congregatio de Auxiliis.
After 10 years of intense theological debate (1597-1607), with everybody’s lives on the line, tense, sweaty theological moment after theological moment tapdancing with Death on the edge of Eternity(one slip and the Inquisition – who had actually set up the Congregatio de Auxiliis to blow the lid off the case – would drag you across the street and show you to the fishes in the aquarium of tomorrow-omorrow-morrow-orrow or something) the new Pope on the case, Pope Paul V, as Beyond Dordt and De Auxiliis The Dynamics of Protestant and Catholic Soteriology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, says on page 11:
forbade accusations of Calvinism in Jesuit arguments against the Dominican position and of Semipelagianism in Dominican treatises written against the Jesuits. And in 1611 he required treatises on efficacious grace to be approved by the papacy, requirements that needed to be repeated in 1625, 1641, 1654, 1690, 1733, 1748, and 1794.
So efficacious grace was the problem all the way to 1794, the year of the first aerial battlefield reconnaissance, the Thermidorian Reaction and the first Monthly Fashion Magazines. Papal approval of treatises was meant to stop endless disagreements about how efficacious grace was efficacious. At some time after 1794 apparently nobody was seriously interested anymore in burning anyone for having some funny ideas about efficacious grace.
And what were the solutions that were allowed to coexist after 1607? There was a compromise solution that everyone ignored but which superficially resembles Leibnitz’s much later rhetorical exercise on the topic (As we will see, Leibnitz on the cosmic level was definitely actually a Molinist) and the standard orthodox Dominican/Calvinist/Lutheran solution that had been around since St. Augustine thundered against the Pelasgians, a solution in which God supplied the exact dose of grace needed every step of the way to salvation as determined by Predestination or blown away by second Predestination as needed. And there was also the Jesuit Molinist solution that seemed to resemble the ideas of efficacious grace as proposed by Remonstrant Calvinists and the Arminians. The resemblance was superficial but it had the crucial aspect of allowing grace to be efficacious without being directed directly every step of the way by God. And even more to the point, it was not a matter of the Orthodox imagery of grace. The Molinist set of schemata for the efficacy of grace was much more seriously cosmic than any other scheme. Essentially the Molinist scheme proposed that God foresaw all possible paths to salvation for every person in every possible version of every possible world. God did this via a special Scholastic mechanism known as Scientia Media, that is, intermediate knowledge, a kind of hyper-Bayesian mode of supersymmetric cosmic vision that allowed every single human (or angelic or fully divine even) being to potentially follow a more-or-less effectively infinite number of potential paths to salvation. So Schrödinger’s Imago Dei, was not just alive and dead, but alive and dead in an infinite number of forms and variations in an infinite number of possible universes.
You can see how this probably inspired Bayesian statistics as well as the infinite dimensional Hilbert Spaces used in solving the Schrödinger Equation. Also, at the cosmic level of all possible worlds, it inspired Leibnitz’s idea of how you could run everything in the universe at every level as needed by Pre-established Harmony. Logically, a sufficiently prudent and efficiency-minded Deity such as God, could select any Reason as Sufficient Reason and run the harmonizing mode of Scientia Media and produce a fine particular set of functions with which to construct this, the best of all possible worlds.
So far so good, and, as with any good physical theory, Scientia Media, solves a lot more problems than it was originally designed to solve.
And – despite a lot of the usual Leibnitzian rhetoric about rationality – Leibnitz was definitely a Molinist, at least at the cosmic level where all those possible worlds might exist or not. For example as Juan Garcia notes in his article (see below in sources) Leibnitz wrote:
[S]trictly speaking it is neither the foreknowledge of God, nor his decisions, that determines the sequence of things, but the mere comprehension of possibles in the divine understanding; or the idea of this world, seen as a possibility prior to the decision to choose and create it. It is therefore the nature of things themselves which produces their sequence, prior to all decisions [of God]; God chooses only to actualize that sequence, the possibility of which he finds ready-made. (Leibniz letter to Jaquelot, September 1704, §4, WFI 188)
Given that sort of thing, from the point of view of Scientia Media, the Enlightenment was not an orgy of Scientific lust, but an orgy of efficacious grace running on harmonious paths, which would seem to be a harsh environment for both Newtonian methods and Rococo Churches full of miracles.
And it was as we will see. The harmonious universe envisioned by Scientia Media and Leibnitz started well but soon encountered a number of problems. For example, the Newtonian imagery of how things worked, the explosive frameworks of Rococo miracles and deistic clockwork, Melancholy, and the actively sensual mental worlds envisioned by the Pietists. Plus of course (from the opposite direction), the Strum und Drang and Neoclassicism and Time’s dark chariot travelling near from an Ancient Greece that can barely steer. The massive probabilistic lumber of Scientia Media provides a superabundance of perfect wreckage for any conceptual disaster by 1794 if not sooner
.
For example, in Aesthetic terms, does Leibnitzian pre-established harmony and this, the best of all possible worlds, hold up even against the smallest of some hints of a more diverse and swirling productive side of Nature? Does the Scientia Media flow just as freely into an abundance of less optimized pathways? And is this other, less eternally optimized, side of the cosmic flow of efficacious grace just as visible or accessible to human actions? Are, in fact, the natural eddies of a more normally varied flow more immediate to the senses than any pre-established harmony however filled with grace? And if so, how do the vast probabilities of primordial disharmony work in a later Enlightenment or Early Romantic set of experiential schemata haunted by the effectively infinite possibilities of the Scientia Media?
Sources:
Juan Garcia’s article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molinism
Mulsow, Martin, trans H. C. Erik Midelfort (!yes!) The Hidden Origins of the German Enlightenment, Cambridge U, 2023
Beyond Dordt and De Auxiliis The Dynamics of Protestant and Catholic Soteriology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries Edited by Jordan J. Ballor, Matthew T. Gaetano, and David S. Sytsma, Brill, 2019
And topics: