ABSTRACT
Later-medieval solutions to the problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingents were the culmination of the development of ideas surrounding issues that philosophers and theologians had been debating for many centuries. Peter Auriol and other early fourteenth-century scholastics cited with frequency the pertinent texts of these venerable ancients or antiqui: Aristotle worried about what would happen if future-tensed propositions had to be either true or false; Augustine and Boethius helped develop and popularize a view of God in eternity that allowed for His immutable knowledge, yet preserved contingency and human free choice; and Boethius and Anselm articulated a modal theory that distinguished between what they considered benign and malignant senses of the necessity that one could tie to God’s knowledge of the future. Actual debates with other scholars were tegjnning to take shape, in some places almost in a different language from that of Lombard, with much more Aristotelian technical terminology.
