ite,
and the knowledge and omnipotence of God, whereby he has not only known
from all eternity everything that is, or that can be, but also has willed
it, is infinite. Thus we have enough intelligence to recognize clearly and
distinctly that this power and this knowledge are in God; but we have not
enough so to comprehend their extent that we can know how they leave the
actions of men entirely free and indeterminate.' The continuation has
already been quoted above. 'Entirely free', that is right; but one spoils
everything by adding 'entirely indeterminate'. One has no need of infinite
knowledge in order to see that the foreknowledge and the providence of God
allow freedom to our actions, since God has foreseen those actions in [344]
his ideas, just as they are, that is, free. Laurentius Valla indeed, in his
_Dialogue against Boethius_ (which I will presently quote in epitome) ably
undertakes to reconcile freedom with foreknowledge, but does not venture to
hope that he can reconcile it with providence. Yet there is no more
difficulty in the one than the other, because the decree to give existence
to this action no more changes its nature than does one's mere
consciousness thereof. But there is no knowledge, however infinite it be,
which can reconcile the knowledge and providence of God with actions of an
indeterminate cause, that is to say, with a chimerical and impossible
being. The actions of the will are determined in two ways, by the
foreknowledge or providence of God, and also by the dispositions of the
particular immediate cause, which lie in the inclinations of the soul. M.
Descartes followed the Thomists on this point; but he wrote with his usual
circumspection, so as not to come into conflict with some other
theologians.

366. M. Bayle relates (_Reply to the Questions of a Provincial_, vol. III,
ch. 142, p. 804) that Father Gibieuf of the Oratory published a Latin
treatise on the freedom of God and of the creature, in the year 1639; that
he was met with protests, and was shown a collection of seventy
contradictions taken from the first book of his work; and that, twenty
years after, Father Annat, Confessor to the King of France, reproached him
in his book _De Incoacta Libertate_ (ed. Rome, 1654, in 4to.), for the
silence he still maintained. Who would not think (adds M. Bayle), after the
uproar of the _de Auxiliis_ Congregations, that the Thomists taught things
touching the nature of free will which were entirely