Chapter 1 3 min read
Creation and Universal Divine Causality
From the minimally refined research manuscript
A theology of miracle must begin before miracle. If God is imagined as one finite cause among others, miraculous action will look like competition with nature. Classical Catholic theology begins instead with creation: every creature depends upon God for being and action, while possessing real created powers of its own.
For Aquinas, God establishes a genuine order of secondary causes. Fire heats, organisms heal, and terrestrial and celestial processes act according to their created powers. God ordinarily acts through those causes, yet God is not another cause inside that system. He is the first and universal cause upon whom the whole causal order depends.
Consequently, God can produce an effect without employing the secondary causes by which that sort of effect ordinarily occurs. This is not God “breaking the laws of nature,” as though God were an unusually powerful physical object violating rules external to himself. Aquinas explicitly says that God can act outside the order of secondary causes without acting against the supreme order, because that secondary order itself depends upon God.
This fits the metaphysical framework required by the doctrine of creation. God is not a competing agent alongside created agents. Divine causality is ontologically prior to the creaturely causal order itself.
The Creator-creature distinction gives this non-competitive causality its deepest form. Creatures are real causes precisely as creatures: their being and powers are received rather than self-explanatory. Divine causality therefore does not occupy the same explanatory level as creaturely causality. The same participatory structure that allows a creature genuinely to act also allows God to act extraordinarily without displacing creaturely agency as though two finite causes were struggling for one causal slot.
Participation here is analogical rather than pantheistic. Created being can receive, image, and manifest divine perfection according to a finite mode, but it never becomes a constituent of the divine essence. Miraculous manifestation therefore intensifies disclosure, not ontological mixture.
Hence a miracle is better described as:
an extraordinary divine actualization of a created state of affairs outside the proportionate causal powers of the created order by which that state would ordinarily be realized.
Aquinas says a miracle strictly so called requires something beyond the order of the whole created nature, not merely something whose natural cause we happen not to understand. God alone can therefore work a miracle simpliciter. Angels or demons may produce effects that vastly exceed ordinary human capacities while nevertheless remaining within the total range of created powers. Those may appear miraculous to us, but they are not miracles in the strict metaphysical sense.
That gives Catholicism a three-level ontology that is often lost in modern discussion:
Creation, conservation, concurrence, and secondary causality. This is absolutely fundamental. God does not act only when miracles occur. Every creature exists because God continually communicates being to it. Catholic creation theology says God sustains creatures “at every moment,” enables them to act, and leads them toward their ends.
Consequently:
natural event: God acts through the created causal order.
miracle: God produces an effect outside the proportionate operation of that ordinary created causal order.
So the contrast is not God versus nature. It is between different orders of divine action with respect to secondary causes.
This is one reason Aquinas's framework is much better than “violation of the laws of physics.”
Aquinas, ST I, q. 44; q. 104; q. 105, aa. 5–8; CCC §§301, 306–308; Aquinas, ST I, q. 4, a. 3; q. 44, a. 1.
A closer look
Questions raised here.
How can God act miraculously without competing with nature or displacing genuine created causes?
Because divine and creaturely causality do not occupy the same explanatory level. Creatures possess genuine powers and really produce effects, but their existence and causal powers are themselves received and sustained by God. God’s universal causality therefore grounds rather than rivals secondary causality. Miraculous action is exceptional with respect to the ordinary employment of created powers, but it does not imply that created causes were unreal or that God and nature were struggling for the same causal “slot.”
What distinguishes a miracle from an ordinary act of divine providence?
Every natural event already depends upon divine providence, so divine causation by itself cannot define miracle. Ordinarily, God governs through the created powers and causal relations he has given things. In a miracle, God produces an effect outside the proportionate operation of the created causal order by which that sort of effect would ordinarily be realized. The distinction is therefore not God versus nature, but ordinary and extraordinary relations of divine action to secondary causality.