II. Replies to the preliminary arguments
CAN GOD MAKE THINGS OTHERWISE THAN AS IS WELL-ORDERED?
his grace can prevent him from being a sinner.6 Analogously, if a king prevents someone from committing a murder, he does not act contrary to his universal law concerning murderers if he does not condemn that person. But it would not be consistent with that particular law if God were to save Judas. For God can foreknow that Judas is to be saved by his ordered power, though according to some other order, because he set things up in that way according to some order that was then possible; according to the actual order, of course, he cannot do so by his ordered power, but only by his absolute power.
12 As for how the divine will has power with respect to particulars and with respect to establishing correct laws, but not by willing the opposite of what he wills now, that was explained above, in distinction 39.7
II. Replies to the preliminary arguments 13 In reply to the argument [for the negative, n. 1], it is clear that the inference is not valid, since if God had made things in some way other than as it is now well-ordered for him to make them, that would not mean that he was making them in a disordered way. For if he established other laws and made those things in accordance with those laws, those things would be made ordinately precisely because of that fact.
14 In reply to the argument for the affirmative [n. 2], I concede what it proves concerning God's absolute power. Still, if God's absolute power were to be the principle of anything, it would by that very fact be his ordered power—but not according to the order he had established beforehand, the same order that he had before.8
6 Literally, God can "go before him with his grace." The reference of course is to "prevenient grace," but I have translated praevenire as 'prevent' to preserve the parallel in the next sentence. Cf. the Collect for the Seventeenth Sunday after Trinity in the English Prayer Books: "Lord, we pray thee that thy grace may always prevent and follow us, and make us continually be given to all good works"; the word 'prevent' having long ago lost that sense in English, modern-language versions substitute 'precede.'
7 See Reportatio IA dd. 39–40 qq. 1–3 nn. 57–9.
8 Less elliptically: it would be his ordered power, not because it would accord with the original order he had established, but because it would accord with a different order that he would have established, as he retains the power to do.