14.4 Providence and Secondary Causes (SCG 3,77–83)
14.4 Providence and Secondary Causes (SCG 3,77–83)
I have already shown that Aquinas thinks that God governs creatures by operating through secondary causes. But he returns to this conclusion in SCG 3,77–83 so as to spell out some additional details concerning it. In doing so, he adopts a rather hierarchical notion of causality, one that I have already shown surfacing in SCG 3. He argues that God rules some creatures by means of other ones that are superior to them. The idea that God should do this seems to be one that Aquinas derives from the thought that God would bring it about that a world that best reflects God as the source of all being would be one in which all possible ways of being are to be found. This thought, in turn, leads Aquinas to say that, should God choose to create, God can be expected to make a world containing various things that depend for their activity on things greater than them in certain ways.
Aquinas’s development of this idea might seem to you unobjectionable to some degree since part of it amounts to him only saying that beings with intelligence frequently direct things that lack it. As we read in SCG 3,78: “Of all creatures the highest are the intellectual ones. … Therefore, the rational plan of divine providence demands that the other creatures be ruled by rational creatures.”33 Things become murkier, however, as Aquinas develops this thought.
In SCG 3,79, for instance, he claims that “the lower ones of an intellectual nature must be governed by the higher ones.”34 This conclusion leads him to hold that there are intellectual things that govern intellectual beings such as us, if only by helping them in some way. In SCG 3,80 he refers to angels as “spiritual things” that know God better than we do and share in God’s governing of creatures. In SCG 3,82, Aquinas, using arguments that will seem archaic to many people now, says that the planets (the celestial bodies, as he calls them) can have an enormous influence on earthly events.35
Whether or not we swallow what Aquinas says about angels and heavenly bodies as causal agents, however, it is clear what he is chiefly driving at in SCG 3,77–83. This is the thesis that “as far as the planning of the order to be imposed on things is concerned, God disposes everything by himself.”36
With a view to angels and heavenly bodies, we also need to notice that, while Aquinas attributes serious causal efficacy to them in SCG 3,80 and 82, and again in SCG 3,91, he resolutely denies (1) that celestial bodies can coerce our intellects (SCG 3,84), (2) that they are the causes of our willing and choosing (SCG 3,85 and 87), (3) that corporeal effects on earth come about from celestial bodies of necessity (SCG 3,86), and (4) that angels or any other intellectual substance can directly cause our choosing and willing (SCG 3,88). In defending these denials, Aquinas draws on arguments he has previously offered to the effect that our intellects are immaterial so as to develop criticisms of thinkers whom he takes to dispute them. God, Aquinas insists, “is the first principle of our acts of counsel and of will.”37 He agrees that we might be aided by what secondary causes bring about in us while operating under God’s governance (this point is underscored in SCG 3,92); but he denies that all events come about as necessitated by them as they so operate (this point is emphasized in SCG 3,92, in which Aquinas eschews talk about fate, considered as the subjection of all things “to the necessitation of the stars”).38 For Aquinas, it is God’s providence that rules the created order, not the causality of secondary agents empowered by God.
14.4.1 Some More Objections to Belief in Divine Providence (SCG 3,94–96)
In SCG 3,94, however, Aquinas raises five objections to this conclusion.
The first runs: “If all things that are done here below, even contingent events, are subject to divine providence, then, seemingly, either providence cannot be certain or else all things happen by necessity.”39 The idea here seems to be (1) that if there are contingent events, then God cannot guarantee what will happen, which would undermine belief in divine providence, and (2) that if all that happens falls under God’s providence, then everything that happens is determined or necessitated to happen.
The second and third objections appeal to God’s knowledge. According to the second, if God foresees what will happen, then it has to happen. More precisely:
If divine providence is certain, then this conditional proposition must be true: If God foresees this, then this will happen. Now, the antecedent of this conditional proposition [i.e., “God foresees this”] is necessary, for God is eternal. Therefore, the consequent [i.e., “this will happen”] is necessary, for every consequent in a conditional proposition must be necessary when the antecedent is necessary. So, the consequent is like the conclusion of the antecedent, and whatever follows from a necessary proposition must be necessary. Therefore, it follows that, if divine providence is certain, all things must occur by necessity.40
According to the third objection, “it is either necessary, if all things are foreseen by God, that divine providence be not certain or else that all things happen by necessity.”41
Suppose that something is foreseen by God; for example, that a certain man will become a ruler. Now, it is either possible that he will not rule, or it is not. But, if it is not possible that he will not rule, then it is impossible for him not to rule; therefore, it is necessary for him to rule. However, if it is possible that he will not rule, and if, given the possible something impossible does not follow, then it does follow that divine providence will fail; hence, it is not impossible for divine providence to fail. Therefore, it is either necessary, if all things are foreseen by God, that divine providence be not certain or else that all things happen by necessity.42
As for the fourth objection, the argument is: if God foresees all things, then fate, not God, accounts for what happens, there is no choosing done by anything, and “free choice is taken away if divine providence be certain,” as are all contingent causes.43 And, according to the fifth objection: “Divine providence does not exclude intermediate causes, as we showed above [see SCG 3,77]. But, among causes, some are contingent and capable of failing. So it is possible for an effect of providence to fail. Therefore, God’s providence is not certain.”44
The objections to the certainty of divine providence that Aquinas notes in SCG 3,94 are not stupid ones, and some of them are still pressed by contemporary philosophers. We should, therefore, not be surprised to find Aquinas considering them as he proceeds with SCG 3,94. We might suppose that he will reject them largely because he thinks that he has already established the reality of divine providence and has also shown that what is not necessary can fall under it. And in this supposition we would be correct. Indeed, having presented the objections now in question, Aquinas first says that “for the purpose of answering these arguments, we must repeat some of the observations put down before.”45 And at the end of SCG 3,94 he remarks: “Those arguments in favor of the necessity of effects foreseen by God, which might be drawn from the certainty of knowledge, are solved above, where we treated of God’s knowledge [see SCG 1,63 and following]. Yet in SCG 3,94 Aquinas does have some precise responses directly aimed at the arguments against the certainty of divine providence noted in that chapter.
For one thing, he maintains that nothing can prevent God’s foresight, which extends to both necessary and contingent things and events. He continues:
So, it is obvious that, though divine providence is the direct cause of an individual future effect, and though it is so in the present, or in the past, indeed from eternity, it does not follow … that this individual effect will come about of necessity. For divine providence is the direct cause why this effect occurs contingently. And this cannot be prevented.46
Again, Aquinas argues: “It is also evident that this conditional proposition is true: If God foresees that this event will be, it will happen. … But it will occur in the way that God foresaw that it would be. Now he foresaw that it would occur contingently. So, it follows that, without fail, it will occur contingently and not necessarily.”47 Yet again, says Aquinas, something in the future that is foreseen by God may be something able not to be; yet “it is not possible for the order of providence to fail in regard to its coming into being contingently … [and] … it can be maintained that this man may not become a ruler if he is considered in himself, but not if he be considered as an object of divine foresight.”48 With the fourth and fifth objections above in mind, Aquinas argues (1) that causes and ways of being are as subject to providence as effects, so “it does not follow that, if everything be done by divine providence, nothing is within our power” because “the effects are foreseen by God, as they are freely produced by us,” and (2) that it is appropriate to God’s providence “sometimes to permit defectible causes to fail, and at other times to preserve them from failure.”49