Great explanations from you both. I am not in the best state of my brain, being sick, but I will try to do my best. For me (don’t know about you), this is not an intellectual game, but it is a real personal issue and causes me real pain.
I understand that this is derived from classical theism (I have read about it but I am not an expert). Since nothing happens that it is not caused by God, God is the last cause of a man being saved or damned, since God grants efficacious grace who He wants to. As Bonald says, free will is not an issue because it operates “inside the novel” while unconditional election operates “outside the novel”.
You can answer like Saint Paul at Romans 9:21 and say that God, as creator, is entitled to do as He wills. Fair enough.
But, then, you cannot get God off the hook for not giving efficacious grace to the reprobate. It seems to me that Thomism wants to have it both ways. He wants to make the God the cause of everything (because he writes the novel) but not the responsible of the damnation (because the damnation is caused by the sin of the characters inside the novel). ArkansasReactionary says that not saving a person is not equal to being responsible of their damnation. This would be true in a normal sense (with people). But, when God is involved, you cannot say this. Using the C.S.Lewis example,
“In Hamlet a branch breaks and Ophelia is drowned. Did she die because the branch broke or because Shakespere wanted her to die at that point in the play?…The alternative suggested by the question is not a real alternative at all–once you have grasped that Shakespere is making the whole play.”
(CS Lewis, God in the Dock, p.79).
It seems that Thomism says that Shakespeare is the writer of the play, but he is not responsible of the death of Ophelia. Shakespeare didn’t do anything to save Ophelia, but he didn’t do anything to break the branch (the branch broke because it was a weak branch) so he is not responsible. So the the death of Ophelia was to blame only to the branch breaking and Shakespeare had no responsibility about that. This does not seem reasonable to me, because Shakespeare is the writer of the Hamlet universe, so he could do whatever he wanted in this universe, even suspend the law of gravity in the play. However, I may be mistaken about the Thomism position, being bad in philosophy.
In addition to not finding the Thomist position rationally sustainable, I don’t think that Thomism has to be accepted as an article of faith. I know that some Pauline texts seem to imply this interpretation. However, I don’t see this view compatible with some other Bible verses («God does not will that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance») and the spirit of the Gospel. I don’t see the “good news” of the gospel anywhere if Thomism is true. And the Catholic Church has not decided between Thomism and Molinism.
In a more personal matter, the idea of an all-powerful God creating people only to let them suffer eternal torment because He wants to seems completely repugnant to me. By contrast, I don’t have any problem with God wanting the genocide of the Canaanites. It would be difficult to distinguish this God from Satan. Of course, being awful is not the same as being false but I don’t think Thomism has the data on its side. As always, I could be mistaken and you are better than me in philosophy.