For every Reason and therefore for the divine Reason as well. And now theological ethics must find a way out of this dilemma: either God does not foresee the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of his omniscience, that is, of one of His essential attributes; or God foresees the decisions of free human Will, then this is a denial of the Freedom of the Will, the essence of which, according to Renouvier, lies in the fact that it cannot be foreseen. For this impossibility of being foreseen is indeed the quality by which Free Will stands or falls. Let us realize the significance of this concept. Nothing can be foreseen which will not with certainty occur. But whatever at some future time will become a reality, must even now be virtually a reality for an omniscient Reason not bound by the human categories of time and space, since for this Reason neither proximity nor distance exists, but everything is on one plane, and there is no future or past, but everything is present. So if the divine Reason foresees now how the free Will of man will act in the future, that is equivalent to saying that this free Will is forced to act in the particular way which God foresees and not otherwise. Therefore the Will is not free but, on the contrary, strictly bound. It is obliged to make the event foreseen by God a fact, as God can only foresee what must certainly come to pass, and a foreseen event that does not happen would mean a mistake, a false assumption, of which one cannot believe God capable without denying Him. This apparent free Will is coercion at sight. As its action is foreseen by God, the Will is subject to the law of fate, but a period of delay is granted. Every movement of the supposedly free Will becomes a part of the order of the universe which has been unalterably laid down from eternity, and which the human Will cannot upset without burying God in the ruins. Man may imagine that his Will is free. But that is self-deception, and he can only indulge in it because what God sees clearly is hidden from him, namely, the goal towards which, though he does not realize it, he is inevitably led along strictly defined paths by the iron hand of fate.
It would be unjust towards theology to say that it has never seen the incompatibility of Free Will with divine omniscience. This has not escaped its notice, but it has attempted by the use of familiar formulæ to get out of the difficulty. In his book _De libero Arbitrio_ Saint Augustine stoutly maintains that the human Will is free, but he tries to rescue the attributes of the deity by reserving to it the right or the power to intervene by its mercy in the actions of the Will, if in its freedom it comes to a decision which endangers the salvation of the soul. Saint Thomas Aquinas takes good care not to differ in opinion from the Bishop of Hippo. The reformers, Calvin, Luther and Bishop Jansen, too, were better logicians than the patristic writers, and unhesitatingly denied the freedom of the Will, but they did not notice that they made God responsible for all the misdeeds of man, lacking freedom and acting with God's foreknowledge and at His behest. The Council of Trent scorned all these contradictions and unintelligible points, and declared with infallible authority that man's Will is free and that at the same time God is omniscient. The Catholic Church at the time was in some countries still in a position to meet Reason, if it raised objections, with an unanswerable argument: the stake.