Chapter 18 3 min read
Intercession, Relics, and Instrumental Causality
From the minimally refined research manuscript
The communion of saints is intelligible only if creaturely mediation is distinguished from divine principal causality. Saints do not rival God; their intercession belongs within the one divine economy of grace.
This is one of the most important Catholic safeguards against magical thinking.
A saint does not possess a supernatural “miracle power” as though holiness had given him or her an occult causal faculty. Aquinas explicitly says divine omnipotence cannot become an inherent habitual power belonging to a creature. The human person may pray, speak, touch, bless, invoke Christ, or function instrumentally, but God remains the principal agent. Even relics can function instrumentally without implying that dead matter contains autonomous magical energy.
This produces a very useful Catholic syntax:
God performs the miracle; through X; for Y; as a sign of Z.
God heals someone through the intercession of a saint, for the person's good, in such a context that the event may also testify to the saint's heavenly holiness.
“Saint X performed a miracle.”
Christ is the unique case because the agent acting through Christ's humanity is the divine Son himself. Aquinas consequently describes Christ's humanity as instrumental to the divine action while insisting that the power by which a true miracle occurs is divine.
Lambertini's foundational proposition is unequivocal:
God alone is the independent and authoritative principal efficient cause of miracles.
He explicitly invokes Aquinas: a miracle properly speaking exceeds the order of the whole created nature, something only God can do.
Yet Lambertini does not therefore eliminate creaturely instrumentality. Angels and saints may participate as instruments. He reviews a scholastic dispute about whether their participation should be called physical instrumental causation or moral/intercessory causation, but deliberately refuses to make his project depend on deciding that intramural dispute. His conclusion is enough:
God alone remains the true, independent, authoritative efficient cause; creatures are instruments of divine power.
He cites Aquinas to the effect that God principally operates whether he instrumentally employs an interior motion, human speech, an external act, bodily contact, or even contact with a dead body or relic.
This is very important for a deeply informed Catholicism.
When ordinary Catholic language says:
“St. Francis worked a miracle,”
the metaphysically expanded statement is something like:
God produced the miraculous effect, with Francis functioning according to the divinely willed mode of intercession or instrumentality.
The saint does not possess a little reservoir of omnipotence.
Relics fit the same pattern. Their theological significance does not rest on occult energy residing in matter. Their relation to the holy person and to divine action is instrumental and ecclesial. The metaphysics of instrumentality allows Catholic devotion to remain robustly material without becoming magical.
Miracles also belong to the theology of the Holy Spirit and the charisms. Catholic teaching recognizes extraordinary gifts while insisting that they are ordered to the good of the Church and must be exercised under charity and discernment. Their ecclesial fruit therefore matters: communion, conversion, truth, and charity are more consonant with the economy of the Spirit than vanity, factionalism, fear, exploitation, or doctrinal disorder.
The communion of saints provides the specifically ecclesial context for saintly intercession. The blessed remain united to Christ and to the Church; their intercession is not an alternative channel alongside Christ’s mediation but a participation within it. The same grammar governs Marian miracle claims: Mary’s role is unique in relation to Christ, yet never autonomous from him or capable of supplying a rival revelation.
Within a Trinitarian account, saintly intercession is even more clearly participatory. The saints do not mediate alongside Christ as independent channels of supernatural power; their prayer is communion in the Son and, by the Spirit, within the one economy ordered to the Father. The same principle guards devotion from both magical individualism and a reduction of the communion of saints to mere remembrance.
Charisms likewise belong to the Spirit’s building up of the Body. Their extraordinariness never makes them superior to sanctifying grace or charity. The more central supernatural gift is participation in divine life itself; spectacular gifts are ordered to that communion and to the edification of the Church.
Aquinas, ST II–II, q. 178; ST III, q. 43; CCC §§956–957, 1674–1676; Lambertini, De Servorum Dei IV.1, ch. II; 1 Corinthians 12–13; CCC §§951–959, 1997; Vatican II, Lumen Gentium §12.
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.”
How can invocation, prediction, timing, location, relics, devotional focus, and surrounding circumstances identify the object a miracle is alleged to attest?
They provide what might be called the event’s evidential address. Lambertini’s canonization analysis shows this particularly clearly: if one servant of God is explicitly invoked and an extraordinary effect follows in the appropriate circumstances, the invocation helps identify whose intercession is at issue. If several saints are invoked indiscriminately, attribution becomes weaker or underdetermined. Likewise, a prediction fulfilled at the relevant time may be more semantically specific than an event arbitrarily associated with a claim decades later. The point is to establish the miracle in individuo, with respect to the particular object allegedly attested.