EleutherIA — Defined term

Divine Prescience (Foreknowledge)

πρόγνωσις

Roman Imperial to Late Antiquity

Divine prescience (prognosis / praescientia) is divine knowledge of future events, including acts attributed to human choice, and raises the question whether infallible knowledge makes those events necessary. In De fato 30 Alexander argues, hypothetically, that foreknowledge can track contingent things without converting them into necessities; this need not include definite knowledge of which option an agent will choose. Origen, De oratione 6.3, argues that divine foreknowledge is not the cause of future acts arising from what is up to us; the converse-causation formula should instead be cited witness-specifically to Rufinus, Commentary on Romans VII.6.5, or to the Greek parallel at Philocalia 25.3. In Consolation V.6 Boethius treats all times as present to divine intelligence and distinguishes an event's own modality from the conditional necessity of its being known; “nunc stans” is later shorthand, not Boethius's wording there.

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