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n i n e Divine Providence and John 15:5 Steven A. Long “Without me you can do nothing” (Jn 1:). One of the chief meanings of these words according to St. Thomas Aquinas is—as he writes in chapter  of the first part of the third volume of the Summa contra gentiles—“That in all things that operate God is the cause of their operating .” St. Thomas further writes in chapter : Hence it is clear that in all things that operate God is the cause of their operating . For everyone that operates is in some way a cause of being, either of essential or of accidental being. But nothing is a cause of being except in so far as it acts by God’s power. Therefore everyone that operates acts by God’s power. This teaching remains the source of great difficulties for those who wish to preserve theism while denying divine omnipotence. And this category of brow-furrowed theists contains more occupants than may at first be apparent. Speech about human freedom often supposes that the reality of a free act cannot be caused by God. It is widely thought that if God is a cause of the free human act, then this cause must be only a remote precondition—a sort of deistic stage-setting—and not a causality that extends as far as moving the human person freely to act, actualizing the person’s free self-determination. Yet the denial that God activates and moves human creatures freely depicts divine causality as coercive or violent, and defines human freedom in metaphysical terms more proportioned to God than to a creature that can neither be nor act apart from God. This strongly contrasts with the teaching of St. Thomas, who describes the divine causality of freedom as follows: Free-will is the cause of its own movement, because by his free-will man moves himself to act. But it does not of necessity belong to liberty that what is 140 = free should be the first cause of itself, as neither for one thing to be cause of another need it be the first cause. God, therefore, is the first cause, Who moves causes both natural and voluntary. And just as by moving natural causes He does not prevent their acts being natural, so by moving voluntary causes He does not deprive their actions of being voluntary: but rather is He the cause of this very thing in them; for He operates in each thing according to its own nature. (ST I, q. , a. 1, ad ) Far from moving the human will violently, God is the cause of the natural motion of the will, constituting it as what it is. He articulates the same point more starkly in the following lines from De malo, q. , a. 2, ad : When anything moves itself, this does not exclude its being moved by another, from which it has even this that it moves itself. Thus it is not repugnant to liberty that God is the cause of the free act of the will. Indeed, apart from God the natural motion of the will could neither be—it is not self-existent—nor be applied to action, since the act of the will represents a surplus of actuality that itself must be reducible to the first cause. Everything that moves from potency to act is moved by another in act—indeed, quod movetur ab alio movetur is for St. Thomas an evident principle. Thomas considers that God is the first author both of the will’s being and of its natural motion and free choice. God moves necessary things necessarily, and contingent things contingently.1 He puts the point pronouncedly when he writes: Man is master of his acts, both of his willing and not willing, because of the deliberation of reason, which can be bent to one side or another. And although he is master of his deliberating or not deliberating, yet this can only be by a previous deliberation; and since this cannot go on to infinity, we must come at length to this, that man’s free choice is moved by an extrinsic principle, which is above the human mind, namely by God, as the Philosopher proves in the chapter on Good Fortune.2 God is the first mover, the first object of appetite, and the first willer. Thus as he puts it, “every application of power to action is chiefly and primarily from God...

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