14.6 Miracles (SCG 3,98–102)
14.6.1 Preliminaries (SCG 3,98–100)
So far in SCG 3, Aquinas has presented a view according to which God acts so as to establish a world that, though deriving from God, has its own way of working. He has been arguing that created things in it operate in different ways, sometimes by necessity and sometimes not. He has also been arguing that created things regularly operate in certain ways so as to achieve certain ends. Yet Aquinas knows very well that some of his Christian colleagues, not to mention some of his Jewish and Islamic ones, believe that God can somehow override the order of nature (in which X regularly follows from Y, and in which some events that have occurred cannot be produced by the God-given natural powers of creatures). In short, he is aware of belief in miracles, to which he turns in SCG 3,98–102. The word “miracle” does not actually occur in SCG 3,98–100. It comes to the forefront only in SCG 3,101. Yet SCG 3,98–100 is clearly working up to a defense of the claim that miracles can occur or might have occurred—this being a claim that one would expect Aquinas to accept if only given what we read in the New Testament, which seems to report events that we might take not to be explicable scientifically.
The “working up” stage of Aquinas’s discussion of miracles argues as follows:
1. God creates by will, not necessity. Therefore, God can make things that are other than what he makes while governing things as a whole by his providence.
2. “God can do nothing that does not fall under the order of his providence, just as he can do nothing that is not subject to his operation. Nevertheless, if his power is considered without qualification, he can do other things than those which are subject to his providence or operation, but, because of the fact that he cannot be mutable, God cannot do things that have not been eternally under the order of his providence.”55
3. There is a general order in created things such that some of them causally depend on other ones. But God, who acts from will, not necessity, can act apart from this order by, for example, bringing something about that causally derives only from him, not from something created. “The very perfect artisan can produce any kind of work that the less perfect artisan could make. Now, God operates through will, and not through natural necessity. . . . Therefore, he can produce immediately, without special causes, the smaller effects that are produced by lower causes.”56 God, by his essence, “is able to produce immediately every effect that any particular agent can bring about.”57 God “is able immediately to move anything to any effect without intermediate causes.”58
4. Although the order established by providence represents God’s goodness, it does not do so perfectly since no creature is equal to God. “But that which is not perfectly represented by a given copy may again be represented in another way besides this one. … Therefore, the divine will is not limited to this particular order of causes and effects in such a manner that it is unable to will to produce immediately an effect in things here below without using any other causes.”59
5. We can sometimes make ourselves to be well or ill, to be in a good way or a bad way, by imagination and emotion that override bodily principles working in us. So it is possible for God to produce effects in creatures “without using the causes that are naturally brought into being for the purpose of producing such an effect.”60
6. The order imposed on things by providence results in various events occurring—for the most part, but not always, for sometimes things fail in their actions for naturalistically explicable reasons. But if the natural order can produce what occurs rarely, then “it is more certain that divine power can sometimes produce an effect, without prejudice to its providence, apart from the order implanted in natural things by God.”61 God’s doing this, indeed, “makes it evident that the order of things has proceeded from him, not by natural necessity, but by free will.”62
7. For God to bring about what a created secondary cause cannot produce is not for him to act against nature (contra naturam) even though it is for him to act apart from the order found in nature. That is because God brings it about that something comes to be as subject to the divine will, which is appropriate for something in nature to be. By bringing about an effect lacking a natural cause, God is not doing violence to anything or offending against the status of something that is there in the natural world.
14.6.2 Miracles Directly (SCG 3,101–102)
With these observations made, Aquinas proceeds to a head-on discussion of miracles while noting: “Things that are at times divinely accomplished, apart from the generally established order in things, are customarily called miracles.”63 So you can now, I hope, see why I take SCG 3,98–100 to be concerned with miracles, even though Aquinas does not use the word “miracle” in these chapters. Indeed, SCG 3,98–100 effectively presents and completes his SCG defense of the claim that miracles are possible.64 All that SCG 3,101 seeks to show is how miracles might be differently categorized even though “those things must properly be called miraculous which are done by divine power apart from the order generally followed in things.”65 And all that SCG 3,102 maintains is that only God can work miracles.
In SCG 3,101 Aquinas notes that there are three kinds of miracle.
First, he says, there are ones “in which something is done by God which nature never could do.”66 In this connection, he instances the sun reversing its course, or standing still, and a sea opening up to allow people to pass through it.67
Second, says Aquinas, there are “those events in which God does something which nature can do, but not in this order.”68 In this connection, Aquinas instances animals living after being dead, seeing having been blind, and walking having been paralyzed. Nature, Aquinas notes, can bring about living, seeing, and walking people. But it cannot bring them to be living having been dead, seeing having been blind, or walking having been paralyzed.
Finally, says Aquinas, there are miracles in which “God does what is usually done by the working of nature, but without the operation of the principles of nature.”69 Here he means that God might bring about what can be brought about by created things, though without them being involved in the occurrence of what comes about.
In SCG 3,102 Aquinas argues that only God can work miracles since, by definition, a miracle is something that a creature cannot bring about. As I have shown, Aquinas takes all creatures, no matter how exalted, to be secondary causes existing and acting by the power of God. Creatures, for Aquinas, make up the world of things with different natures acting under God’s providence so as to produce effects commensurate with those natures. So he finds it obvious that creatures cannot function so as to bring about what can only result from God. Or, as he says: “Whatever is completely confined under a certain order cannot work above that order. But every creature is established under the order which God has put in things. So, no creature can operate above this order; but that is what it means to work miracles.”70 We may, Aquinas goes on to say, be frequently astonished by things that occur by the powers of created things. But these are not miracles. They are what ought to lead us to improve our scientific knowledge. It is, Aquinas notes, “the prerogative of God alone to work miracles. Indeed, he is superior to the order in which the whole of things is contained, just as from his providence this entire order flows. Moreover, his power, being utterly infinite, is not limited to any special effect or to the production of a particular effect in any limited way, or order.”71