Causality and Pure Nature

Jacob Schmutz’s contribution to Surnaturel: A Controversy at the Heart of the Twentieth-Century Thomistic Thought (Faith and Reason: Studies in Catholic Theology and Philosophy) is a dense exploration of the development of the theology of pure nature in the context of shifting notions of causality, concursus, action.  His study supports de Lubac’s contention that late medieval and post-Reformation scholasticism contributed to the formation of a “naturalistic” outlook in which man could “close himself up” in his nature.  The article is too packed to untangle and summarize here, but a few highlights.

1. Schmutz begins with Thomas, not only because Thomas was the touchstone of later medieval debates but also because Schmutz finds Thomas’ theory more persuasive and coherent than later theories.  According to Thomas, “God not only furnishes and conserves in every secondary cause the power to act, but he likewise acts on the secondary cause in order to produce its actual operation according to a mode that is proper to the secondary cause.  With respect to the will and freedom of choice of the secondary cause, this doctrine means that God orients the will toward such and such a directly freely, while with respect to natural causes, he does it naturally.”  Thomas resolves any apparent conflict between God’s causality and human freedom with an appeal to analogy and by stressing the essential participation of secondary causes in relation to primary causes.  Thomas uses the terms   influentia and influxus “to designate the first cause’s action in the secondary cause.”  This gives ontological anchorage to causality: “The first cause gives being, the secondary causes only determine it.”  There is thus a hierarchy of causes, working in different registers, and the causa prima influit plus quam causa secunda .

2. Already before the end of the 13th century, the ontological dimension of Thomas’s doctrine comes under attack.  In the debate between “mediationists” and “conservationists,” both sides oppose the notion of God’s immediate action on the creature and instead propose that God causes with a mediated causality.  This debate marked the “end of the honeymoon” (Gilson) between philosophy and theology, since it implied that “the actions of secondary causes are no longer described under the aspect of their dependence on the first cause, but under the aspect of their own proper order, to which divine causality will be able to come and freely join.”

3. Scotus figures in here (you knew he would!).  While Thomas insisted that secondary causes depended “intimately” on God’s gift of being to them, Scotus argues that “every composite effect can be generated by a created cause only by passing through the action of creatures themselves, who by the very fact become themselves equally ‘givers of being.’”  In short, the “being of the effect does not depend any longer on [God’s] gift of being.”  Concurrence is reconceived as the simultaneous operation of primary and secondary causes, an acting-along-with rather than an acting-in.  We’re on our way to Ockham’s and Molina’s notion that God and man each contribute as partial causes to the effect, just as two men pull a boat by their combined strength.  As a result, “the less perfect cause can add something, inasmuch as the cumulative effect of the more perfect cause and the less perfect cause is more perfect than the effect of the more perfect cause alone.  The created world can thus add some perfection and nobility to what comes from the uncreated cause, which therefore is no longer necessarily more perfect or nobler than what it causes.”

4. Schmutz carefully examines what he describes as a “revolution” in medieval thought that is evident in the change in the meaning of influentia from the fourteenth century on.  In his description of illumination, Bonaventure claims that the human intellect cannot know truth without the influence of the uncreated light.  This is not, however, merely an influx of knowledge, but a concurrence of the uncreated light with the soul.   Influentia thus names something other than the divine light itself.  From epistemology, this moves into ontology and theologies of grace.   Schmutz explains that “What distinguishes this model is precisely the fact that it allows a split between the two orders where before there was continuity: influence is split into general, that which accompanies every act of the creature, and special, that which God must voluntarily grant to go beyond what is naturally possible for man.”  Bonaventure makes wider connections, explaining “the correspondence between this model that regulates noetics and the relationship between nature and grace: general influence upholds us in all our acts, while grace falls under special influence.”  Divine influence remains primary, but it is reduced to a general natural concurrence that conserves man’s power to act.  And Bonaventure applies this to Adam: General and natural concurrence is not the same as the donum integritatis that kept Adam intact.  By virtue of the natural and general concurrence with all acts, it is possible for human beings to do do good without any addition of special grace. From the start, “the formation of this opposition between two orders of influence is tied to the development of a hypothesis of man in the state of ‘pure natural capacity’” and tied also to semi-Pelagian view of human capacity.  General influence is the that keeps the semi in semi-Pelagianism.

5. Eventually, we come to Molina and Suarez, who claim to be working in a Thomist framework but are in fact up to something quite different.  Instead of the Thomist view that actions are “fully performed by two total but subordinated causes,” the Jesuit “Thomists” claim that “if neither of the two causes is superfluous , then that means that neither of the two causes is the integral cause, capable of serving as the whole reason for the production of the effect, but rather both causes must be considered as uniquely partial and concurring together to produce their common effect.”  Two men pulling the boat again, an analogy that Thomas had explicitly rejected.

6. In the seventeenth century, the development arrives at a point where the secondary causes are considered sufficient to themselves, principal in their order: “the Jesuit school appears literally to have ‘reversed’ the traditional order.”  Juan Caramuel Lobkowitz drew the logical conclusion that God’s action in the world was unreal: “it has become superfluous, since it adds nothing that would differentiate between the meritorious and the unmeritorious, the free and the necessary.  He thus invites us quite simply to forsake this centuries-old paradigm of concurrence and no longer envision anything but the world of secondary causality, henceforth the only field for a legitimate analysis of movements on the fact of the earth, be they free or natural.”