De peste quaestiones duae explicatae

were to perish in the shipwreck, nevertheless, when the sailors were preparing to flee from the ship, he said, You cannot be saved unless these remain. Christ also, although He knew His hour had not yet come, nevertheless more than once withdrew Himself when He was being sought for death.

Arg. 8. Finally, that which they assume as most certain, namely that contingency is at odds with the firm and constant decree of God, although it does not greatly pertain to the matter, yet who would grant it to them? We call those causes contingent which, by their own nature, can turn out in either direction. If anyone removes these from the nature of things, I do not know if he will find any man of sufficiently sound judgment agreeing with him. The will of God, they say, quoting Augustine, is the necessity of things.
Response. I concede this, as far as the outcome and the effects of the causes themselves are concerned. But, as he most rightly says, it does not follow that although all things which God has decreed to be future must necessarily be, they nevertheless come to pass from necessary causes, just as the Stoics falsely concluded, and this can be proven by certain and entirely evident examples. For what? Do we not believe that Christ was truly endowed with human bones? Therefore, those were things which could, by their own nature, be broken at any time. Yet they could not be broken in actual fact, since it had been decreed otherwise by God. Therefore, they were not broken contingently, as far as their own nature is concerned, although they were fragile, and yet they necessarily remained unbroken by the decree of God. Again, from the very time that Christ assumed our flesh, all Christians confess that He was endowed with a mortal body. Therefore, by its own nature, it could have been killed by Herod along with the other little children: but by the decree of God, it could not. Therefore, the fact that He was not killed then happened contingently if you look at the nature of the body itself, since it could have happened otherwise: but by the decree of God, it could no more be killed than the will of God could be changed. The same is true when He was dragged to the cross; He certainly had the health such that it was not necessary for Him to die then. Therefore, He died contingently if you dwell on the natural cause of death, and yet necessarily, if you ascend to the invariable ordination of the Father; since His hour had come: and at the same time voluntarily, since He laid down His soul for us. Thus, neither contingency nor will is repugnant to the most certain divine decree.