Divine Causation and Human Freedom in Aquinas
by Brian J. Shanley, O. P.
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Ina previous paper I argued that creation was the key to understanding
Aquinas’s view of the relationship between eternity and time.' Such an
approach has a strategic advantage insofar as it allows fora comprehensive
account of divine omniscience: because God’s creative causation is all-
pervasive, so too is God’s knowledge. Yet a causal-practical view of God’s
knowledge immediately raises the troubling specter of divine determinism:
if God knows our actions by in some sense causing them, then how can we
truly be free? For many it is axiomatic that a causal account of divine
knowledge entails a denial of human freedom because it is usually assumed
that human freedom requires causal independence from God; any kind of
divine causation of human action is automatically coercive and
determinative. Even in the eyes of those willing at least to entertain the
possibility that some form of divine causation is compatible with human
freedom (for example, contemporary Molinists like William L. Craig),
Aquinas’s view of divine causation simply goes too far in the direction of
divine determinism;’ this is especially so for those who identify the
Bafiezian praemotio physica with Aquinas’s position.
In the face of these prima facie powerful and plausible criticisms, it
probably comes as a bit of a surprise to a contemporary reader to find that
\“Etemal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” American Catholic Philosophical
Quarterly 71 (1997): 197-224.
2See his account of Aquinas in The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future
Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), 99-126. His concluding
sentence is: “In maintaining that God’s knowledge is the cause of everything God knows,
Thomas transforms the universe into a nexus which, though freely chosen by God, is
causally determined from above, thus eliminating human freedom.”
Copyright 1998, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. LXXII, No. |100 AMERICAN CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY
Aquinas is quite confident that his position does not entail divine
determinism. Aquinas squarely faces the problem in numerous contexts
and always concludes that there is no incompatibility between divine
causation and human freedom. When Aquinas’s confidence on this point
is contrasted with the corresponding confidence of his critics, it becomes
clear that each side brings a quite different set of assumptions to bear upon
its assessment of the issue. What this reveals is that ultimately it is the
background understanding of the metaphysical relationship between God
and the world that determines how the issue of divine determinism is
resolved.
It is the aim of this paper to explain Aquinas’s confidence about the
compatibility of divine causation with human freedom by elucidating the
background assumptions about God and God’s relationship to the world
that underlie Aquinas’s position. Specifically, it will be argued that once
again Aquinas’s view of God as Creator is the key to his treatment. As
Creator, God utterly and uniquely transcends the categorical order of
mundane causes (for example, necessary and contingent) so as to be no
threat to created causes but rather their enabling origin. The same God who
transcends the created order is also intimately and immanently present
within that order as upholding all causes in their causing, including the
human will. The Creator God is not a rival in danger of overpowering
human agency, but rather the one who generously creates us to be
genuinely free in imitation of God’s own freedom.
The first step in getting Aquinas’s picture into focus is to set his
account of God’s causal relationship with the human will within the larger
context of his understanding of God’s causal activity in the being of all
beings and the causing of all causes. It is vital to see Aquinas’s treatment
of God’s causal influence on the human will as a corollary to his treatment
of God’s causal influence on all created causes. Aquinas’s assertions about
God’s causal influence on the human will aré not meant to account for
some peculiar feature in human action and, most importantly, must not be
construed as an attempt to account for something in the psychology of
human action. It is rather that Aquinas’s metaphysical understanding of
God as Creator and unique causa esse requires that God be actively present
in the causing of all causes, including human agents. Hence this paper will
begin with an overview of Aquinas’s general account of God’s operation
in all created causes as the necessary background to God’s operation in the
human will. What will emerge from this is a proper understanding of the
relationship between God’s primary causation and created secondaryDIVINE CAUSATION AND HUMAN FREEDOM IN AQUINAS 101
causation such that the latter’s dependence upon the former does not
compromise its genuine efficacy. With this background in place, it can be
shown how Aquinas understands the relationship between divine causation
and the human will. It will then be possible to turn to the specific context
of divine providence wherein the divine will is not a threat to human
freedom but rather its originative and enabling ground. We are free
because of God, not despite God.
It will be vital throughout to attend carefully to Aquinas’s texts and
terminology in order to distinguish his position from that of his subsequent
interpreters. For as Freddoso has noted, “both Bafiezianism and Molinism
are probably best regarded as alternative attempts to compensate for what
many Catholic thinkers, especially in the light of the Reformers’ influential
writings on these very matters, took to be a lacuna or at least a lack of
explicitness in St. Thomas’s work.” It is not my intention here to rehearse
the old debates between Bafiezians and Molinists; although my sympathies
lie with the former, I cannot endorse the traditional “Thomist” position for
reasons which will become clear in the course of this paper. Rather than
take up the post-Reformation scholastic challenge to fill in the gaps and so
provide an exhaustive account of the mechanics of divine causation, I shall
argue instead that Aquinas’s refusal to say more than he does is not a
weakness in his position but rather a strength. Like Wittgenstein, Aquinas
knew that we must not presume to speak about what lies beyond our ken:
“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dariiber muss man schweigen.”* To go
any further than Aquinas does in trying to explain divine creative
causation, as the Bafiezians do, is inevitably to lose sight of its
transcendence. And to do that is to betray the central premise of Aquinas’s
resolution of the apparent conflict between divine causation and human
freedom.
I,
God the Creator of Causes: Aquinas works out his account of the
relationship between divine causation and created causation in response to
various theological and philosophical currents either denying or severely
3{ntroduction” to Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the
Concordia), trans. Alfred Freddoso (Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1988), 8.
“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7.