14. Providence at Work (SCG 3,64–110)
Providence at Work (SCG 3,64–110)
“FROM THE POINTS that have been set forth,” says Aquinas at the start of SCG 3,64, “we have adequately established that God is the end of all things.”1 If God is that, however, then God must govern or rule all things. God must provide for them or exercise providence over them. So, starting at SCG 3,64, Aquinas turns directly to the topic of God’s providence, a subject that will occupy him until the end of SCG 3. In discussing it, he breaks his treatment into two parts while following up on what he promises in SCG 3,1 concerning his order of procedure for SCG 3,64–163. First, he talks about providence in general, insofar as it amounts to God’s governing of all creatures (SCG 3,64–110). Then, in SCG 3,111–163, he turns to providence with an eye on “creatures possessed of understanding.”2 What he says in SCG 3,64–110 is the topic of this chapter. I shall turn to the arguments of SCG 3,111–163 in the following one.
That God governs all things seems obvious to Aquinas given his previous claims that everything created derives from God in its entirety and that all creatures are ordered to the goodness that is God. If these conclusions are true, he says, then God clearly governs all creatures. Soldiers in an army, he observes, have the good of their commander as an end and are governed by their commander. By the same token, Aquinas presumes, “Since all things are ordered to divine goodness as an end … it follows that God, to whom this goodness primarily belongs … must be the governor of all things.”3 Again, he says that if God is the first unmoved mover, then God must operate in all that moves, and must do so by understanding. Yet, Aquinas notes, “to rule or govern by providence is simply to move things toward an end through understanding”—meaning that “God by his providence governs and rules all things that are moved toward their end.”4 As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that even nonthinking things move toward ends. And this, too, is something that leads him to say that God governs creatures. For, he reasons (reintroducing a line of thinking to be found in SCG 1,13):
It is impossible for things that do not know their end to work for that end, and to reach that end in an orderly way, unless they are moved by someone possessing knowledge of the end (nisi sint mota ab aliquo habente cognitionem finis). … So, the whole working of nature must be ordered by some sort of knowledge. And this, in fact, must lead back to God. … Therefore, God governs the world by his providence.5
Aquinas notes that some ancient philosophers held that “all things come about as a result of material necessity, the consequence of which would be that all things happen by chance and not from the order of providence.”6 Yet, he insists, if the universe is of God’s making, it is governed by understanding and is not just composed of what acts blindly or randomly with no goal or purpose behind it.