Abstract
In Chapter 3, W. Matthews Grant presents an overview of Aquinas’s account of divine causation, focused on three main tasks. First, it presents the background needed to understand the ways in which Aquinas thinks God is a cause, as well as how he thinks divine causation is both like and unlike ordinary creaturely causation. For example, he explores how Aquinas understands God to be (or to be analogous to) an efficient cause, a final cause, and an exemplary cause. Aquinas understands God alone to bring about existence absolutely, whereas creaturely causes bring it about only that some pre-existing matter exists in this way or that. Second, he explains what Aquinas understands to be the wide-ranging implications of his claim that God is cause of all being apart from himself. Aquinas thinks all sorts of things follow from this claim, from divine simplicity, to the claim that God is absolutely perfect, to the claim that God is omnipresent, to the claim that nothing escapes the divine providence. Finally, Grant shows how Aquinas’s account avoids certain problems about God’s interaction with creaturely causes that have much exercised contemporary theists.
As we have seen, medieval thinkers believed that God creates everything that exists ex nihilo and that everything that exists depends on God’s conservation to continue to exist after its creation. This all-pervasive conception of God’s causality presented a challenge to explaining the role that created powers have in the causation of new substances and qualitative changes. If God is an active cause of all things that exist at all times when they exist, how can creatures also be casually responsible for the coming to be and changing of things in the created world?