 Up to this point, Aquinas’s position is fairly clear. There has been considerable controversy over the centuries, however, regarding whether Aquinas wants to go further and characterize the will’s agency as  nondeterministic—as  its being, in other words, a first and undetermined cause of free action. Within a few years of his death, after the  Condemnation of 1277,  views of this sort came to dominate scholastic philosophy, yielding a broad consensus that held until the rise of seventeenth-century anti-scholasticism. Readers of Aquinas have been sharply divided, however, over where he fits into that history. At first glance it might seem obvious that Aquinas is an opponent of determinism, given his adamant opposition to the will’s being necessitated. Yet Aquinas writes at a time at which the governing form of Aristotelianism, drawn from the Arabic tradition of Ibn Sīnā and Ibn Rushd, is explicitly deterministic. In general, Aquinas strives where he can to harmonize the faith with the mainstream of philosophical opinion, and here in particular he shows signs of endorsing causal determinism as applied to the created world. Thus he ascribes to Ibn Rushd (“the Commentator”) the doctrine that “from that which is open both ways (ad utrumlibet) no action follows, unless it is inclined one way by something else” (ST 1a 19.3 obj. 5). He hastens to reject this principle when applied to God, who is able to determine freely God’s own choices. But outside the case of God he accepts the principle: “a cause that is of itself contingent must be determined to its effect by something external” (ibid., ad 5). Accordingly, he explicitly insists that the will’s freedom does not require it to be its own first cause. Instead, he characterizes the will’s operations as entwined over time with the operation of intellect, running backward through an agent’s history, with one cause preceding another, all the way back to God’s initial creation of the human soul (Quest. on Evil 6, ST 1a 83.1 ad 3, ST 1a2ae 9.4c). This insistence on determining causes might seem to fit well with his strict conception of  divine providence: