 The topic of grace and free will was the main ingredient of the controversy over Molinism. It began with the work of Molina mentioned above, Liberi arbitrii cum gratiae donis, divina praescientia, providentia, praedestinatione et reprobatione concordia (Molina 1588 [1953]), in which he explains how God can preserve his omnipotence, providence, and pre-knowledge, while conceding free will to humans, by means of his scientia media, or “middle knowledge”, which gives him the ability to know what human beings will decide—but no control over their decisions. Scientia media is placed between scientia naturalis, by which God knows everything that can be, and scientia libera, by which he knows what will be. Molina places God’s counterfactual knowledge before the creation—contrary to Luther and Calvin. God’s omnipotence consists in the possibility that he could have created beings without the capacity to accept or reject the offer of grace by their will (Concordia pars IV, disp. 52). Furthermore, humans are able by their free will, without the special help of God (“sine auxilio speciali Dei”: Concordia pars I, disp. 5; Molina 1588 [1953: 29]), but only with his concursus generale, to act morally in a temporal sense; however, they need grace within temporal life and God’s special help for the effort to receive eternal grace, i.e., the visio beatifica, the vision of God of the blessed after their death. In the ensuing controversy, known as De auxiliis, fierce criticisms came from the Dominican Domingo Bañez, who had the first chair of theology at Salamanca, and his pupils; they held a special Thomist theory of grace, which referred to the praedeterminatio physica, mankind’s inability to resist God’s grace.