De causa Dei: Book III, Chapter 31
Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei contra Pelagium (1344). English translation: Wroot Press, CC BY-NC 4.0; machine-learning use permitted with attribution (https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/rights/).
Source: Henry Savile's edition, London 1618, 755B–755E; Latin from EEBO-TCP A16626 (public domain).
Canonical: https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/3/31/
Status: draft translation, not yet reviewed.

[755B]
CHAPTER XXXI. He recalls the same hypothesis by way of the necessity and contingency of the divine intellect and knowledge.

[755B–755C]
The same hypothesis can likewise be argued against by way of the necessity and contingency of the divine intellect and knowledge. For before a thing's presence or its passing into the past, God knew contingently that it had always been going to be and would be. But in its presence, or in its passing, he knows necessarily that it had always been going to be, and that it is or was. Therefore he then knows otherwise, intrinsically, than he did before. This is against the premises argued above and against the authorities cited earlier. Nor can any rational cause be assigned for this new necessity in the divine knowledge, since the arguments about a new necessity in the divine willing or will forbid it, if they are suitably transferred to the divine knowledge, the fifteenth of the first prevailing and the sixteenth coming to its aid.[n1] Nor can such a necessity be posited without a rational cause, as was shown against the last response.

Again, suppose the divine knowledge is contingent to either alternative with respect to future things, and necessary with respect to present and past things. Then God knows present and past things more certainly, intrinsically, than future things; for the things known in the former way are more certain than the latter. For things that are necessarily of some sort are more certainly of that sort than things that are such only contingently, to either alternative: the former cannot fail to be of that sort, the latter can. God, therefore, knows present and past things more perfectly than future things. For to know something with certainty is more perfect than to know it with uncertainty. Hence God is changed intrinsically and made better anew, and he does not know future things with supreme certainty, nor with supreme perfection.

[755D–755E]
For this greater certainty also no rational cause can be given. It is not intrinsic to God, since he is not changed intrinsically; nor is it extrinsic, since no extrinsic thing causes anything in him, as the fifteenth, the sixteenth and the twentieth of the first teach. Therefore the Wise Man too says in Ecclesiasticus 23:[n2] "To the Lord God, before they were created, all things were known; so also after they are complete he looks upon all things"[n3]. "So," he says, "and not otherwise." Hence Augustine too, in On the Trinity 15, chapter 13:[n4] "Nor did he know created things otherwise than things to be created; for nothing was added to his wisdom from them, as it is written in the book of Ecclesiasticus: 'Before they were created, all things are known to him; so also after they were completed.'" "So," he says, "not otherwise." The same Augustine, in On Genesis according to the Letter 5, chapter 18, says: "I do not dare to say that it became known to God itself in any other way when he had made them than in that by which he had known them in order to make them, with whom there is no change nor shadow of alteration." Hence Peter too, in the Sentences 1, distinction 35, says: "God knew from eternity, eternally, and everything that was going to be, and he knew it immutably. He also knows past and future things no less than present ones, and by his eternal and immutable wisdom he himself knows all things that are known."

NOTES

1. "The fifteenth of the first … the sixteenth" (and below "the fifteenth, the sixteenth and the twentieth of the first") are Bradwardine's own cross-references to Book I. They are left as written (Conventions §5.4) and not resolved here. The ablatives decimo quinto primi … decimo sexto succurrente are construed as absolute, giving the sense "the first prevailing, the second helping".
2. Sir 23:29 (Vulgate). The "Wise Man" is the author of Ecclesiasticus (Sirach). The syntax of the quotation is dative: "To the Lord God … all things were known." The Vulgate reads post perfectum, "after [they are] complete", which is the sense given.
3. The margin beside this passage has two separate entries, "Ecclesiasticus." and "Augustinus", placed at different lines. The keyed text has only one marker, 755D·2, for both, and both are listed under it above.
4. Augustine, De Trinitate XV.13 (quoting Sir 23:29), and De Genesi ad litteram V.18 (the closing words echo Jas 1:17). The Augustine quotations are free and compressed, not verbatim. Peter Lombard, Sententiae I, d. 35, has the sense of the last sentence rather than its exact wording.