Gift and Causation

Gift and Causation April 5, 2006

Further along his his treatment of de Lubac, Milbank discusses the change in the meaning of causality and divine causality in the medieval period. Drawing on the work of Jacob Schmutz, he gives this account: Prior to 1250, influentia was understood in its etymological sense as a “flowing-in” from God to creatures. As Milbank says, from this viewpoint, “the ‘general’ divine activity is indissociable from God’s ‘special’ activity, his overall from his particular providence.” Bringing in the category of gift, Milbank notes that on this view “the creative influence of God does not influence creation, but posits creation as influence (it is ‘a gift of a gift to a gift’). In this sense, it is radically unilateral.” But as a radically unilateral gift, it is a gift of gratitude, and must be “since outside gratitude (the worshiping ‘return’ of all things to their source, from which they alone have existence) there is no finite esse .”


By this account, God is the “single unilateral and total cause of everything,” but at the same time since “he causes by sharing his own nature, by giving his gifts to-be, the lower levels exert within their own sphere their own secondary and equally total causality. There is a kind of ‘exchange without reciprocity.’ There is reciprocity in the Trinity, and reciprocity within the Creation, but not between the Creation and God, because even though there is ‘exchange’ in the sense that creatures receive by returning, God properly receives nothing.” God’s unilateral influence is not “general in the sense of establishing an overall determining parameter,” but rather in specific actions and causations of the creation: “the determining is here only established (creative cause within the Creation) in and with the determined, the general only as the sum of specific instances, even though it is a dynamis in excess of those instances.”

Divine and human causation are thus never in competition; causation is not a “zero-sum game” in which creaturely causation can only be affirmed at the expense of divine causation. Everything is wholly the product of God’s action, and yet at the same time it is totally caused by creatures. By the 13th century, however, this view was disrupted and “influentia” began to mean “simply an extrinsic conditioning, as when one says ‘I was too much influenced by that person.’” On the older view, “the higher and especially the highest cause is always more deeply active at a lower level than any secondary cause” (God is more deeply the cause of my sneezing than the particles in my nose); on the newer view, “a higher cause operating on a lower level is just ‘one other’ causal factor – like homework set by a teacher for the evning which is only one factor, alongside the demands of boyfriends and girlfriends, what’s on downtown, etc., determining how the evening will actually be spent.” Divine causality comes to be seen as a “general” influence that is supplemented by the special influence of miracles, and primary and secondary causes join forces, as it were, in a shared concursus.

Aquinas had said that lumber comes to be a table by the causal power of the saw; but “the form of the bench comes from the skilled mind which uses the tool.” Scotus, by contrast, denied that the heart could write letters without the “additional” causal power of the hand. Aquinas saw the table coming to reality as the primary cause employed tools to achieve the final cause; Scotus saw a letter coming to reality by the combination of the primary cause and a secondary cause.

Another example: “Bonaventure says that man can do good by his own force with only the help of the divine general concursus. Here already there is opened to view the model that will later be represented by metaphors of two men pulling one barge and so forth, and Schmutz notes that Adolf Harnack astutely saw in Bonaventure a beginning of semi-Pelagianism.” In this, Bonaventure was following Alexander of Hales, “who had spoken of the natural concursus as being at work even in the case of gratia superinfusa . In the case of both general and specific divine causality, a sphere of independent and partial causality had been reserved for the creature. And this is already the space of natura pura .” By rejecting, or at least circumscribing the place of pure nature (at best, a mere limiting concept), Aquinas was ” more Augustinian than the Augustinians.”

Again, one of the interesting things about this account is the light it sheds on current debates within the Reformed world. Is the Reformed doctrine of concursus a throwback to the older view of influentia that Milbank describes? Or does it assume that the secondary causes are “added” to divine causality, as some independent second factor on their own? Classically, it seems to me that the WCF revives the older tradition: Divine causality does not destroy or work alongside secondary causes, but establishes secondary causes. Berkof echoes Milbank’s point that in the divine concursus God is always the primary cause. But has Reformed theology worked this notion of causality out in its soteriology? And, has the Reformed tradition always held to this notion of causality? Has the Reformed tradition reckoned with the ontological import of its soteriology, of Paul’s question, What do you have that you have not received?


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