The relationship of God's grace and man's free will is one of the most disputed topics in the history of Catholic theology. At the time of the Counter-Reformation, a famous quarrel arose between Jesuit defenders of Molina and Dominican defenders of Bañez. This led to a series of Roman congregations on the "aids of God's grace"
(de auxiliis),
which looked into the matter but settled very little, beyond the pope declaring that neither position was heretical. Leo XIII's call to advance Thomism led to this quarrel resurfacing with renewed force in the first quarter of the twentieth century.
Into this fray stepped a renowned Dominican of the University of Fribourg, Francisco Marín-Sola (1873-1932), whose published work on the development of Catholic doctrine had secured his fame among Catholic theologians. In three celebrated articles published in the
Ciencia Tomista
in 1925 and 1926, he presented a new and revised version of the Dominican position on this question. Marín-Sola suggested that his new version rightly developed the principles of Aquinas and was supported in major part, if only implicitly, by earlier Dominican commentators. Marín-Sola's position was instantly controversial, with some respondents decrying an abandonment of Dominican ideas and others declaring that Marín-Sola had resolved central objections and ended the quarrel of
de auxiliis.
In this book, Michael D. Torre makes Marín-Sola's articles available in English for the first time. The articles are preceded by an introduction on Marín-Sola and followed by a conclusion that traces the reception of his thought within the Catholic theological community. In Torre's afterword, he defends Marín-Sola's position as substantively the same as that of Aquinas.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Michael D. Torre, associate professor of philosophy at the University of San Francisco, is author of
God's Permission of Sin
and editor of
Freedom in the Modern World.
Torre is president of the American Maritain Association and serves as general editor of AMA Publications.