Question 14
How can divine sustenance support a creature's own action and freedom?
A received power can be genuinely possessed and exercised without becoming independent of its source.
In this question
The short answer
God's sustaining a creature and the creature's exercising its power concern different explanatory respects. A human act is genuinely ours when it proceeds through our judgment, intention, and control, even though our existence and powers remain received. Divine support need not replace creaturely authorship. But participation alone does not establish freedom: we must explain the agent's own exercise, distinguish enabling from determining an intention, and assess how the account preserves responsibility for morally significant choices.
Possession and exercise
Receiving a capacity does not make its possession unreal. A person can possess understanding, bodily powers, and opportunities that depend on sources beyond the person. The further question is how those capacities enter an action that is the person's own. An inherited or sustained power and a particular voluntary exercise are distinguishable realities.
We identify authored exercise through the agent's grasp of reasons, practical judgment, intention, and control. These need not involve complete independence or perfect self-knowledge. They do require more than an event occurring in the agent. Dependence therefore cannot by itself establish passivity, just as possession of a capacity cannot by itself establish its free use.
Causes at different explanatory depths
Divine causality is not one finite force competing with another for a percentage of the same action. The account concerns the source of the agent's actuality and operative power, while also recognizing the agent's determinate causal contribution. The Catechism affirms real creaturely causes; Aquinas likewise argues against making created agents superfluous when God acts in them.
Calling this relation noncompetitive clarifies a possibility rather than completing a theory. We must explain how the source sustains an actual exercise while its intentional specification remains creaturely. Accounts of concurrence and freedom dispute this point. Evaluate their claims without treating every form of dependence as determination or every affirmation of freedom as independence.
Aquinas explicitly rejects the view that created powers produce no effects. He argues that primary divine causality includes rather than replaces creatures' own operations; a further account of voluntary action is required for responsibility.
We must therefore understand that God works in things in such a manner that things have their proper operation.
Responsibility without isolation
Moral responsibility requires further distinctions. The act's positive actuality, its intended object, its conformity or failure to conform to an appropriate good, and God's permission are not interchangeable. Sustaining a person who acts wrongly does not by that fact amount to intending the wrong as wrong. Yet this distinction does not settle why a particular evil is permitted.
Supported agency also has a human significance. Education, care, friendship, and material assistance can enable a person's own exercise rather than substitute for it. They can also manipulate or displace that exercise. We must examine what support actually does. Dependence neither cancels dignity nor automatically proves freedom; the relevant powers, relationships, and forms of control matter.
The strongest objection
If God sustains the whole act, what remains for the creature to contribute?
The creature's contribution is its actual exercise as a created cause, including its intention where personal agency is involved. Dependence on a source does not make this exercise causally empty. Nevertheless, the account must show how divine efficacy and creaturely control coexist in the concrete act. Simply assigning them different explanatory levels does not settle every dispute about their relation.
What follows
- Genuine secondary causality belongs to Catholic teaching. The detailed relation between divine concurrence and free creaturely settlement remains a philosophical and theological question requiring its own account.
Sources
Connections
- The human person
Dependence and responsibility meet in the subject who acts.