14.5 Providence and Prayer (SCG 3,95–96)
14.5 Providence and Prayer (SCG 3,95–96)
If God’s providence is unchangeable, however, what room is left for the practice of asking God for things? How can belief in the appropriateness of petitionary prayer be reconciled with the claim that divine providence is what it is and cannot be thwarted? Should asking God for things not be dismissed as pointless? Or should we, perhaps, say that, because prayer is not pointless, divine providence can be changed by what we do?
These are Aquinas’s questions in SCG 3,95–96, and his answers to them maintain both that prayer (oratio) is appropriate and that divine providence can be changed by nothing created since God is immutable. I should, however, stress that, when Aquinas uses the word “prayer” in SCG 3,95–96, he is only referring to asking God for things. He is not concerned with prayer as worship or adoration or as anything other than presenting our needs to God as able to satisfy them. Writers on prayer have often construed it in very broad terms. In the SCG, though, Aquinas does not. Nor does he maintain, as some people do, that prayers are always answered. Indeed, the purpose of SCG 3,96 is to note that they are not always answered and why that might be so.
By now you will realize that Aquinas is definitely going to rule out any notion of prayer that takes it to be something by which we coerce God. He thinks of prayer as causal insofar as he thinks that God grants us some things because we have prayed for them. He does not think of prayer as changing God in any way. For one thing, he does not think of it as informing God of our needs, for he takes God to be omniscient. For another, Aquinas does not regard God as moved or changed by our prayers as effects of agent causes can be moved or changed by them. In Aquinas’s view, both answers to prayer and our prayers themselves are part of what comes about by God’s providence.
Given this idea, however, what sense can Aquinas make of prayer? His position is that prayer is appropriate since, when praying, we are asking for what we know that God can bring about.50 He thinks that it is good for us to ask for things from God since that amounts to recognizing what God is and acting accordingly. At the same time, however, he holds that prayer has to be an activity brought about by God. So, he argues: (1) God from eternity wills that the created order should be as it was, is, and shall be; (2) the created order includes free and rational creatures who can and do ask for things that they need from God; (3) it also contains what free and rational creatures have asked for from God; (4) so it contains both people who pray and positive responses to things that people seek in prayer. For Aquinas, God does not answer prayer as a temporal and mutable human being might be swayed to grant a request, but he does providentially work so as to produce people who turn to him for help and so as to bring about what they ask him to provide.
Aquinas therefore says that “prayer is not established for the purpose of changing the eternal disposition of providence, since this is impossible, but so that people may obtain from God the object they desire.”51 Just as God’s providence does not impose necessity on things, it does not prevent us freely asking God for what we want. And, says Aquinas, it is as possible for God to bring about what we ask for as it is for God to bring about what we intend for ourselves as we act so as to help ourselves. You might say that, given divine providence, there is no point in asking for things from God. Yet, reasons Aquinas, that would be like saying that there is no point in walking so as to get to some place at which we want to be. He writes:
Divine providence does not exclude other causes; rather it orders them so that the order which providence has determined within itself may be imposed on things. And thus, secondary causes are not incompatible with providence; instead, they carry out the effect of providence. In this way, then, prayers are efficacious before God, yet they do not destroy the immutable order of divine providence. So, it is the same thing to say that we should not pray so as to obtain something from God, because the order of his providence is immutable, as to say that we should not walk in order to get to a place, or eat so as to be nourished; all of which are clearly absurd.52
In short, thinks Aquinas, God, in accordance with his goodness, “fulfills the holy desires which are brought to completion by means of prayer.”53 Aquinas holds that good desires come from God and that there is nothing to prevent God fulfilling them as expressed in prayer. Indeed, he says, the fulfilling of our desires by God is a case of friendship and love since friends want what people they love want and since God’s answering prayer amounts to him willing what people desire.
What, though, of requests in prayer that are not granted by God? As I have said, Aquinas is not of the view that God always answers prayers by giving people what they ask for. You might say that God always answers prayers in that God always provides what is good for those who pray. Yet Aquinas proceeds in SCG 3,96 on the assumption that there is something wrong with this view. He certainly thinks that God can give us what is good for us without us asking for it specifically. But he does not take this as amounting to God giving us what we have asked for. He takes it to amount to God not doing so. He seems to be supposing that if I ask you for X, and if you do not give me X while giving me something else, or something better than X, then you have not given me what I asked for. So he readily concedes that some prayers are not granted by God, while adding that it is appropriate or fitting (conveniens) that this should be so.
Why might God not give us what we ask for? Here are Aquinas’s answers to this question in SCG 3,96 (all of them presented together with biblical quotations, which I shall not reference):
1. Sometimes people do not ask God for what is truly good.
2. Sometimes people do not persevere in praying for what they want, this indicating a lack of desire on their part or a lack of confidence in God.
3. Sometimes people ask for things from God while lacking humility toward him or affection for him.
4. Sometimes people who pray are not holy, not in tune with what God is all about, not desiring of God’s good will as acting with them to obtain good results.
5. Sometimes people pray for the welfare of those who do not deserve it.
6. Sometimes people pray for what God knows to be harmful to them. And they sometimes pray for what is not as good for them as something else would be.
So, in SCG 3,96, Aquinas goes on to say that divine providence accords with reason in that it works for good in various ways even as it extends to creatures who differ in goodness. As I have shown, diversity among things that exist is, for Aquinas, a sign of God’s goodness because it shows that God wants things of various kinds to be, things with different strengths and weaknesses. While we might instinctively suppose that God would produce something lacking no perfection (a best possible world, as it were), Aquinas invites us to consider the many ways of being, and of being good, that can be brought about by God, considered as the source of all possible things. In a passage presenting a thought that runs through SCG 3, he writes:
Since every created substance must fall short of the perfection of divine goodness, in order that the likeness of divine goodness might be more perfectly communicated to things, it was necessary for there to be diversity of things, so that what could not be perfectly represented by one thing might be, in a more perfect fashion, represented by a variety of things in different ways. … Perfect goodness which is present in God in a unified and simple manner cannot be in creatures except in a diversified manner and through a plurality of things.54
And, thinks Aquinas, diversity is going to give rise to there being some things that are better in various ways than others. Diversity, for him, guarantees inequality brought about by God’s providence. Yet might God not somehow act apart from the order established by his providence in general? This is the question with which Aquinas is concerned in SCG 3,98–102.