38.  This answer is doubtless very correct.  It is agreed that foreknowledge in itself does not make truth more determinate; truth is foreseen because it is determinate, because it is true; but it is not true because it is foreseen:  and therein the knowledge of the future has nothing that is not also in the knowledge of the past or of the present.  But here is what an opponent will be able to say:  I grant you that foreknowledge in itself does not make truth more determinate, but it is the cause of the foreknowledge that makes it so.  For it needs must be that the foreknowledge of God have its foundation in the nature of things, and this foundation, making the truth predeterminate, will prevent it from being contingent and free.

39.  It is this difficulty that has caused two parties to spring up, one of the predeterminators, the other of the supporters of mediate knowledge.  The Dominicans and the Augustinians are for predetermination, the Franciscans and the modern Jesuits on the other hand are for mediate knowledge.  These two parties appeared towards the middle of the sixteenth century and a little later.  Molina himself, who is perhaps one of the [145] first, with Fonseca, to have systematized this point, and from whom the others derived their name of Molinists, says in the book that he wrote on the reconciliation of freewill with grace, about the year 1570, that the Spanish doctors (he means principally the Thomists), who had been writing then for twenty years, finding no other way to explain how God could have a certain knowledge of contingent futurities, had introduced predetermination as being necessary to free actions.

40.  As for himself, he thought to have found another way.  He considers that there are three objects of divine knowledge, the possibles, the actual events and the conditional events that would happen in consequence of a certain condition if it were translated into action.  The knowledge of possibilities is what is called the ‘knowledge of mere intelligence’; that of events occurring actually in the progress of the universe is called the ‘knowledge of intuition’.  And as there is a kind of mean between the merely possible and the pure and absolute event, to wit, the conditional event, it can be said also, according to Molina, that there is a mediate knowledge between that of intuition and that of intelligence.  Instance is given of the famous example of David asking the divine oracle whether the inhabitants of the town of Keilah, where he designed to shut himself in, would deliver him to Saul, supposing that Saul should besiege the town.  God answered yes; whereupon David took a different course.  Now some advocates of this mediate knowledge are of opinion that God, foreseeing what men would do of their own accord, supposing they were placed in such and such circumstances, and knowing that they would make ill use of their free will, decrees to refuse them grace and favourable circumstances.  And he may justly so decree, since in any case these circumstances and these aids would not have served them aught.  But Molina contents himself with finding therein generally a reason for the decrees of God, founded on what the free creature would do in such and such circumstances.