14.1 God as Acting in All Things (SCG 3,65–70)
14.1 God as Acting in All Things (SCG 3,65–70)
To start with, Aquinas goes on to say that God governs things just by making them to exist as tending to goodness (SCG 3,65). Creatures cannot tend to goodness unless they exist, Aquinas argues, since “to the extent that they exist, they bear the likeness of divine goodness which is the end for things.”7 God, says Aquinas, not only makes things to be by making them to begin to exist; God also makes them to be for as long as they exist. So God’s creative causality is at work in the sheer existence of creatures at any time, and God “preserves all things in being through his intellect and will.”8 Unlike something in the world producing its like, Aquinas argues, God makes creatures to be while not being one of them. God does not generate creatures. As the first cause of all things, God creates, which means that he “preserves things in being through his operation.”9 Echoing much that I have already shown him to be saying in SCG 3,65 Aquinas, is clear that “it is impossible for the being of a thing to continue except through divine operation” and that “all natural things are preserved in being by nothing other than the power of God.”10 This conclusion, in turn, leads Aquinas to maintain (SCG 3,66) that, insofar as a creature can be thought to produce what exists, it does so only as acting by God’s power. “It is,” says Aquinas, “as a result of divine power that a thing gives being.”11 He adds: “The first agent is God. So, since being is the common product of all agents, because every agent produces actual being, they must produce this effect because they are subordinated to the first agent and act through its power.”12 Aquinas, of course, does not mean that created agents produce being from nothing as does God. Yet he does think that they bring it about that real things or situations come about; and his point is that they do so by virtue of God’s creative power.
From all of this Aquinas thinks it safe to conclude (SCG 3,67) that God causes the operations of all things that operate. He means that all acting creatures act as made to exist by God when acting as they do and that God, therefore, operates in every creaturely operation. “Every operating agent,” he says, “is a cause of being in some way, either of substantial or accidental being. Now, nothing is a cause of being unless by virtue of its acting through the power of God. … Therefore, every operating agent acts through God’s power.”13 He continues: “Every power in any agent is from God, as from a first principle of all perfection. Therefore, since every operation results from a power, the cause of every operation must be God.”14 It is sometimes said that, once God has established something in existence, the thing can continue to function on its own. But this is certainly not what Aquinas thinks. For him, no creature can do anything unless God brings it about that it does so. He writes:
Just as God has not only given being to things when they first began to exist, and also causes being in them as long as they exist, conserving things in being. … So also has he not merely granted operative powers to them when they were originally created, but always causes these powers in things. Hence, if this divine influence were to cease, every operation would cease. Therefore, every operation of a thing is traced back to God as to its cause.15
And if that is true, Aquinas immediately concludes, God must be everywhere (SCG 3,68). Given that he takes God to be immaterial, Aquinas is not suggesting that God is in all places as occupying them dimensively. He means that God is present everywhere as causing the operations of the things the existence of which constitute places. “The mover and the thing moved,” he notes, “must be simultaneous. … But God moves all things to their operations. . . . Therefore, God is in all things.”16 Here Aquinas is invoking the principle that the action of an agent is in the patient (see chapter 3, section 4.3 here) so as to claim that if God acts in the operations of creatures, then God is in them as an agent cause is present in its effect.
In that case, however, does it not follow that creatures do not actually produce anything? If God brings about the existence and operations of creatures, how can it be that there is any causal agent other than God? Given the arguments of SCG 3,65–68, should Aquinas not conclude that created things are never really causes at all? These questions do seem to arise given what Aquinas claims in SCG 3,65–68, and he is aware of arguments, mostly coming from Muslim philosophers, holding that created things do not genuinely act if God is actively at work in them. He alludes to these arguments in SCG 3,69. Yet he is unconvinced by them. Why? Because, for a number of reasons spelled out in SCG 3,69, he thinks it would be foolish to deny that created causes do have causal efficacy, that, for example, it would be wrong to say that chefs do not produce meals or that bullets have never killed people. God, he asserts, is the maker of all things; but this does not entail that there are no secondary causes (created causes acting by God’s power while also being true causes). If I push the trigger of a gun that emits a bullet that wounds someone, the fact that I do so does not mean that the bullet is not, in fact, wounding the person. By the same token, Aquinas reasons, God’s action as primary cause in the operations of creatures does not mean that the creatures are not acting. “We do not,” he says, “take away their proper actions from created things, though we attribute all the effects of created things to God, as an agent working in all things.”17
Aquinas acknowledges how it might seem difficult “to understand how natural effects are attributed to God and to a natural agent.”18 He notes, for example, that it might seem odd to say that one action can proceed from two agents. He also says that if something can be brought about by one thing, there would appear to be no need for other agents to be invoked for the coming about of the thing in question. Again, he observes that one might suppose that “if God produces the entire natural effect, then nothing is left of the effect for the natural agent to produce.”19 Nevertheless, Aquinas sticks to his claim that God moves and empowers created agents to act and that they do genuinely act even though this is so. He says:
The same effect is not attributed to a natural cause and to divine power in such a way that it is partly done by God, and partly by the natural agent; rather, it is wholly done by both, according to a different way, just as the same effect is wholly attributed to the instrument and also wholly to the principal agent.20
What Aquinas means here is that created agents act and get things done even though their power to act derives from God working in them. For Aquinas, creatures are always secondary causes as they bring about effects. They are secondary, not primary, because all created activity derives from God. Yet Aquinas believes that secondary causes are genuine causes. They have power; so they act. Their power derives from God acting in them; so what they bring about by their power is also what God is bringing about while acting in them. Or, as Aquinas argues prior to what I just quoted from him:
In every agent, in fact, there are two things to consider: namely, the thing itself that acts, and the power by which it acts. Fire, for instance, heats by means of heat. But the power of a lower agent depends on the power of the superior agent, according as the superior agent gives this power to the lower agent whereby it may act; or preserves it; or even applies it to the action, as the artisan applies an instrument to its proper effect, though he neither gives the form by which the instrument works, nor preserves it, but simply gives it motion. So, it is necessary for the action of a lower agent to result not only from the agent by its own power, but also from the power of all higher agents. … And just as the lower agent is found immediately active, so also is the power of the primary agent found immediately in the production of the effect. For the power of the lower agent is not adequate to produce this effect of itself, but from the power of the next higher agent; and the power of the next one gets this ability from the power of the next higher one; and thus the power of the highest agent is discovered to be of itself productive of the effect, as an immediate cause.21
Here Aquinas is thinking of a primary agent as something the action of which runs through what the agent brings about by means of secondary causes. He is thinking of causal series comparable to the example I gave in chaper 3, section 1.2 in which a book moves as resting on a moving book that is, in turn, moved by my hand acting as I will it to move. So, he reasons, if the actions of creatures amount to actions that are empowered by God as they occur, creatures that bring about effects are instruments of God yet, for all that, causes in their own right.