Chapter 2 2 min read
Secondary Causality, Providence, and Divine Action
From the minimally refined research manuscript
Created causality is not an embarrassment to divine action. It is one of providence’s achievements. The distinction between ordinary providential action through creatures and extraordinary divine action beyond their proportionate powers makes miracle intelligible without turning nature into an autonomous machine.
Miracles must be situated within providence rather than imagined as ad hoc divine interventions into an otherwise autonomous machine. Aquinas holds that divine providence governs not only effects but also the causes through which effects arise; secondary causality belongs to providence rather than competing with it.
That becomes extremely important for miracles connected with prayer. God does not first intend one future and then receive new information from Mary or a saint and revise his plan. Prayer itself can belong among the created causes through which providence eternally wills an effect to occur.
The same framework clarifies divine immutability and petitionary prayer. Aquinas explicitly asks: if providence is immutable, why pray? His answer is that prayer does not change the divine disposition; rather, God providentially wills some effects through prayer as a created cause.
Thus:
John prays → God heals Mary
does not mean:
God previously refused → John persuaded God → God's will changed.
It can mean:
God eternally wills Mary's healing through John's freely offered prayer.
This is particularly important for canonization miracles and saintly intercession.
Providence therefore supplies the larger grammar in which miracle occurs. God does not improvise against a resistant world. The same divine wisdom that wills stable secondary causes can will exceptional effects without abolishing the created order as an order.
Petitionary prayer belongs inside this grammar. Prayer is not information supplied to an ignorant deity or pressure applied to a mutable will. It can be one of the freely created means through which providence wills a particular good.
Providence is likewise Trinitarian. Because the external works of the Trinity are indivisible, miraculous agency should not be divided among the divine Persons as though Father, Son, and Spirit were three cooperating causes. Yet the missions give the one economy a personal shape: the Father draws and sends, the Son mediates and reveals, and the Spirit vivifies, sanctifies, and distributes gifts. The whole economy is one divine work personally manifested.
Aquinas, ST I, q. 22; ST II–II, q. 83, a. 2; CCC §§302–314; CCC §§258–260; Aquinas, ST I, q. 43.
A closer look
Questions raised here.
Is a miracle a violation of the laws of nature, or is there a better way to understand miraculous causality?
“Violation of a law of nature” is misleading within the manuscript’s metaphysics. God is not another physical agent inside the universe who overpowers one natural force with a stronger one. The created causal order itself depends upon God, and God can produce an effect apart from the secondary causes by which such an effect would ordinarily arise without thereby acting contrary to the supreme order of providence. A miracle is therefore better understood as extraordinary divine action relative to the powers and order of created causes, rather than as God breaking rules external to himself.
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.”