Divine concurrence
| Latin | Concursus divinus |
|---|---|
| Principal locus | ST I, q. 105; cf. CCC 308 |
| Related | Creation, conservation, providence |
| Doctrinal standing | God's causality in every creaturely act is Catholic teaching; physical premotion and middle knowledge are school opinions |
Divine concurrence is God's operation as first cause in every action of creatures, so that secondary causes truly act while remaining wholly dependent on the Creator for being and efficacy.[1][2]
First cause and second causes
Catholic doctrine does not set God and creatures in competition, as if what the creature does God must omit, or what God does the creature only seems to do. The Catechism teaches that God is the first cause who operates in and through secondary causes. Creatures are true causes. Their efficiency is received. Divine concurrence names that simultaneous dependence: the same act is wholly from God as first cause and wholly from the creature as second cause, according to each cause's order.[1]
Creation gives the substance. Conservation keeps it in being. Concurrence is God's application of the creature to its operation. The three are distinguished in our speech because we are talking about different effects. In God they are one simple act. A Deism that winds the world and walks away denies concurrence and, in the end, conservation as well. A occasionalism that treats creatures as empty stages denies the second cause the Catechism refuses to erase.[1]
God works in every agent
In Summa theologiae I, question 105, Thomas asks how God moves creatures. He holds that God works in every agent, not by replacing the created power, but by giving it being, applying it to act, and being the end of every action. Because existence is the most interior actuality of a thing, the cause of being is interior to every operation that flows from that being. The sun's example in older physics is only an analogy: as light in the air depends on the shining, created action depends on God.[2]
This is not a physical push alongside the creature's push. It is metaphysical. God does not become a second billiard ball in the series. He makes the series be a series of causes. For that reason prayer, science, merit, and sin remain intelligible together. The chemist studies reagents. The theologian does not deny the reagents. He denies that reagents exist or act from themselves.
Freedom, sin, and permitted disagreement
The difficulty is the bad act. If God concurs with every operation, does he author sin? Catholic faith forbids that conclusion. God is not the cause of moral evil. He gives the underlying act as act, and the defect is from the deficient created will. How to state the concurrence of grace with freedom without either Pelagian independence or a necessary sin is the old controversy of the schools. Dominican Thomists commonly speak of a premotion that is physical, not violent, moving the will according to its nature. Molinists speak of middle knowledge.
The Holy See ended the Congregatio de Auxiliis without defining either system. Both must preserve original sin, the priority of grace, genuine freedom, God's innocence of sin, and his universal salvific will. Technical accounts of premotion or scientia media remain theological opinions. They are not the act of a council choosing a side, and they do not unchurch a permitted Catholic school.[3]
Doctrinal core and school mechanics
What must be held is dependence and agency together. God is not a distant spectator. Creatures are not puppets. Providence includes concurrence rather than interrupting it. The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia treats concursus with conservation as the creature's unceasing dependence, while still calling creatures true causes. That is the Catholic line.[4]
Thomism's characteristic contribution is to locate concurrence in the order of being rather than in a special miracle inserted into an otherwise closed nature. Nature is already God's. Grace is a further gift, not the first time God acts. Aeterni Patris commends this metaphysical seriousness. It does not transubstantiate later textbook diagrams of premotion into dogma. The diagrams may help. The dogma is the Creator who gives both the power and the act, without becoming the sinner.
References
- Back to citation occurrence 1.0 Back to citation occurrence 1.1 Back to citation occurrence 1.2 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 279–324 — Authoritative doctrine of creation from nothing, conservation, providence, and God's operation in and through secondary causes.
- Back to citation occurrence 2.0 Back to citation occurrence 2.1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, question 105 — How God moves creatures, including the thesis that God works in every agent as first cause of being and operation.
- Back to citation Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Donum Veritatis — Instruction on the ecclesial vocation of the theologian, distinguishing research, schools of thought, and the Magisterium.
- Back to citation Catholic Encyclopedia (1913), Relation of God to the Universe — Public-domain account of creation, conservation, and divine concursus as the creature's unceasing dependence on God.