Order as the Telos of the Universe in Aquinas and De Koninck

Christian Philosophy Conference

“The Future of Creation Order”
VU University Amsterdam
16– 19 August 2011

Contributed Paper

P. Edmund Waldstein, O.Cist.

Abstract

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the thought of Laval School Thomist Charles De
Koninck (1906-1965). The first volume of a new English edition of The Writings of Charles
De Koninck (Notre Dame 2008) includes previously unpublished material on one of De
Koninck’s central philosophical projects: an attempt at re-formulating Aquinas’ teaching on
the order of creation in the light of modern natural science. De Koninck argued that the
discovery of the radical prozesshaftigkeit of material reality supports Aquinas’ account of the
participatory and non-competitive relation of divine to created causality. From that
conclusion, De Koninck offered a new defense of Aquinas’ thesis that the order of the
universe is its intrinsic telos or final cause.
Aquinas teaches that God created things outside of himself in order that they might
participate in the divine goodness and beauty by way of likeness. Since no single creature can
reflect the infinite perfection of the divine essence, he created a multitude of creatures. But
unity belongs to the very account of goodness and beauty, and thus the multitude of creatures
must be gathered into some kind of unity. Aquinas argues that the mode of unity proper to the
multitude of creation is the unity of order. The order of all created things together is thus the
most perfect reflection of the divine goodness and beauty. And therefore it is this order which
God principally intends in creation. Order is thus the final cause of creation as a whole, and as
such is more desirable for each individual creature than its own individual good.
Aquinas understood the order of the universe as an essential and causal order. All
creatures are ordered to the perfection of the whole that they constitute, but they are also
ordered to each other through created causality. This view was abandoned by late scholastic
and early modern thinkers, De Koninck argues, due to a changed conception of the relation of
divine and created causality. For Aquinas, created causality is radically participatory: the
more a created thing is a cause, the more God is causing in it. God’s causality works from
within the nature of created causes; thus, the effects of created causes are caused wholly by
the created cause and wholly by God.
Baroque scholastics such as Francisco Suárez saw the causality of God as extrinsic to
created causes and (as it were) in competition with them. According to Suárez, that in the
effect which is from God is not from the created cause and vice-versa. The extrinsic view of
order that resulted from this account of causality was taken over by early modern
philosophers, and was an important element in the development of modern science.
Ironically, De Koninck argues, it is precisely from within the project of modern
science that certain truths have come to light that tend to contradict an extrinsic view of divine
causality, and thus support a return to Aquinas. Cosmic and biological evolution show a
causal order of dependence among the various parts of the universe even more radical than
that recognized by Aquinas himself, but fully in harmony with his account of causality: “The
Thomistic tendency … enriches as much as possible the causality of the creature, not with the
goal of eliminating creative intervention, but in order to increase it: for the creative power …
is most profoundly at work where created causes are most causes.” (De Koninck 2008, 292-
293)