Chapter 14. Providence at Work (SCG 3,64–110)
CHAPTER 14. PROVIDENCE AT WORK (SCG 3,64–110)
1. ND, 3/1, 209 [1].
2. See ND, 3/1, 34 [10].
3. ND, 3/1, 210 [2].
4. ND, 3/1, 210–211 [4].
5. ND, 3/1, 211 [5].
6. ND, 3/1, 214 [13].
7. ND, 3/1, 214 [2].
8. ND, 3/1, 214 [3].
9. ND, 3/1, 215 [4].
10. ND, 3/1, 216 [5 and 6]. As the conclusion of SCG 3,65 indicates, Aquinas takes these conclusions to correct “the position of the exponents of the Law of the Moors”—these being Islamic thinkers whom Aquinas does not name but whom he takes to have held that things in the universe do not always and totally depend on God for their existence. So, here again (see note 37 to chapter 13), we have an allusion to ideas coming from Muslims, albeit one that is not developed by Aquinas or backed up by specific citations.
11. ND, 3/1, 218 [2].
12. ND, 3/1, 219 [3].
13. ND, 3/1, 220 [1].
14. ND, 3/1, 221 [2].
15. ND, 3/1, 221 [3]. Aquinas thinks that what he says here squares with biblical teaching. Among other texts, he cites Isaiah 26:12, John 15:5, and Philippians 2:13, all of which emphasize the causal role of God in the actions of people.
16. ND, 3/1, 223 [2].
17. ND, 3/1, 235 [29].
18. ND, 3/1, 235 [1].
19. ND, 3/1, 235 [4].
20. ND, 3/1, 237 [8].
21. ND, 3/1, 236 [5].
22. ND, 3/1, 239 [6].
23. ND, 3/1, 240 [8].
24. ND, 3/1, 241 [10].
25. It sounds platitudinous to say that God makes things to be what they are since a thing has to be whatever it is. What else could it be but what it actually is? But it is not platitudinous to say that God makes things what they are if one is talking to someone who says that everything that exists is what it is of necessity and that it always has to exist. To such a person one might reply “Well, some things that exist are things that do not have to exist, or are things that do not have to be what they happen to be”—which is Aquinas’s main point in SCG 3,72.
26. ND, 3/1, 242 [2].
27. ND, 3/1, 243 [4].
28. ND, 3/1, 244 [2].
29. ND, 3/1, 244–245 [2].
30. ND, 3/1, 246 [2].
31. ND, 3/1, 254 [3].
32. ND, 3/1, 255–256 [5].
33. ND, 3/1, 261 [1].
34. ND, 3/1, 263 [1].
35. Aquinas, indebted to Aristotle, though also influenced by authors later than him, took the earth (considered as spherical and immobile) to be at the center of the universe. He also thought that the sun and the moon and a small number of planets (considered as noncorruptible and unchangeable) rotated around the earth, the whole, in turn, being moved by an orbiting outermost sphere consisting of fixed stars. This cosmology is incompatible with cosmology as we know it today and as emerging by the beginning of the eighteenth century. For more on it, see Edward Grant, Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200–1687 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Also see appendix 3 of volume 10 of the Blackfriars edition of the Summa Theologiae (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967).
36. ND, 3/1, 277 [1].
37. ND, 3/2, 37 [7].
38. ND, 3/2, 50 [6].
39. ND, 3/2, 50–51 [1].
40. ND, 3/2, 52 [4].
41. ND, 3/2, 52 [5].
42. ND, 3/2, 52 [5].
43. ND, 3/2, 52–53 [6].
44. ND, 3/2, 53 [7]. As I have noted, Aquinas thinks that the word “cause” is not the name of a substance and that causes can only be thought to be acting insofar as they bring about effects. So, Aquinas is here evidently thinking of “causes capable of failing” as meaning “things able to cause that are somehow thwarted in doing so for some reason.”
45. ND, 3/2, 53 [8].
46. ND, 3/2, 56 [12].
47. ND, 3/2, 56–57 [13].
48. ND, 3/2, 57 [14].
49. ND, 3/2, 57 [15 and 16].
50. In SCG 3,95–96 Aquinas does not consider prayer for what is logically impossible. He assumes that prayers are offered by people who have needs that they recognize could be met by God as able to bring about what could come about.
51. ND, 3/2, 58 [1].
52. ND, 3/2, 62 [8].
53. ND, 3/2, 58 [2].
54. ND, 3/2, 66–67 [2].
55. ND, 3/2, 74 [3].
56. ND, 3/2, 76 [2].
57. ND, 3/2, 76 [3].
58. ND, 3/2, 77 [4].
59. ND, 3/2, 77–78 [6].
60. ND, 3/2, 78 [7].
61. ND, 3/2, 79 [9].
62. ND, 3/2, 79 [9].
63. ND, 3/2, 81 [1].
64. Notice that in SCG 3,98–100 Aquinas does not argue that any miracles have occurred. All he argues is that miracles could occur. Even in SCG 3,101–102 he does not argue for the occurrence of any specific miracles, though he obviously has biblical texts in mind at certain points. SCG 3’s discussion of miracles is largely hypothetical in the sense that it maintains (1) that miracles could occur (SCG 3,98–100), and (2) that if they occurred they could be classified in different ways and could only be brought about by God (SCG 3,101–102).
65. ND, 3/2, 82 [1].
66. ND, 3/2, 82 [2].
67. Here Aquinas clearly has in mind Isaiah 38:8, Joshua 10:13, and Exodus 14:21.
68. ND, 3/2, 82 [3].
69. ND, 3/2, 82–83 [4].
70. ND, 3/2, 83 [2].
71. ND, 3/2, 85–86 [8]. In SCG 3,103 Aquinas, with particular reference to Avicenna, accepts that there might be nonmaterial substances that can bring about effects in the world that make us marvel. But he denies that they should be taken to be miracles. He also denies that angels or saints can work miracles by their own power.
72. See Elizabeth Anscombe, “Causality and Determination,” which is chapter 13 of volume 2 of Anscombe’s Collected Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981). The title of the volume is Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind. Speaking in a way of which, I suspect, Aquinas would have approved, Anscombe notes: “If A comes from B, this does not imply that every A-like thing comes from some B-like thing or set-up or that every B-like thing or set-up has an A-like thing coming from it; or that given B, A had to come from it, or that given A, there had to be a B for it to come from. Any of these may be true, but if any is, that will be an additional fact, not comprised in A’s coming from B.” (Anscombe, “Causality and Determination,” 136.)
73. This point is effectively made by James Ross. He writes: “The whole physical universe, all of it, is actively caused to be. Still, to say that freedom or human agency is thereby impeded is absurd. Nothing can be or come about unless caused to be by the creator. So the fact that God’s causing is necessary for whatever happens cannot impede liberty; it is a condition for it. Similarly, in no way is our liberty impeded by the fact that God’s causing is sufficient for the being of the very things that do the very things that we do. Nothing possible can be impeded by its necessary conditions.” For this, see James F. Ross, “Creation II,” which is chapter 5 of The Existence and Nature of God, edited by Alfred J. Freddoso (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 131. Also see Herbert McCabe, God Matters (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 14–15: “We are free not because God is absent or leaves us alone, we are free because God is more present—not of course in the sense that there is more of God there in the free being, but in the sense that there is nothing, so to say, to distract us. God is not acting here by causing other things to cause this act, he is directly and simply himself causing it. So God is not an alternative to freedom, he is the direct cause of freedom. We are not free in spite of God, but because of God.”
74. Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 255.
75. William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1987), 74.
76. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 94.
77. For a fine development of this point, see R. M. Burns, The Great Debate on Miracles: From Joseph Glanville to David Hume (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1981).
78. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 31.