Aquinas and Cooperation

Exploring George Hunsinger’s criticisms of Thomas’ views on grace, Kerr argues that Thomas does not, as Hunsinger suggests, make human nature “conceptually prior to and independent of divine grace.” Rather “it is by grace that the soul of the sinner is open to God. Paradoxically, fallen human beings are open to grace naturaliter but this is in virtue of their being open to grace per gratiam .” Hunsinger misreads Thomas by assuming that “Thomas has a doctrine of ‘pure nature’: human beings who are able, independently of divine grace, to bootstrap their way to God. Thomas, on the other hand, quotes Augustine, and surely thinks himself to be in the patristic tradition, according to which human nature is open to grace by grace – only by grace, as we now have to insist, to rule out any idea of ‘pure nature.’”

Thus for Thomas, “Justifying grace is acquired not by the sinner’s own activity, as it were independently of God’s – sed Deo operante .” For Thomas, cooperation is not competition, and this “takes us right to the heart of Thomas’s theology. He often quotes Isaiah 26:12: ‘Lord, thou has wrought all our works in us’ – which he takes . . . precisely as excluding all competitiveness between divine and human agency.” Cooperation for Thomas does not picture “two rival agents on a level playing field,” but rather “sees it as a mark of God’s freedom, and ours, that God ‘causes’ everything in such a way that the creature ‘causes’ it too.”

Thomas consistently contests the notion that “if God produces the entire natural effect, surely nothing is left for the human agent to do,” emphasizing instead a doctrine of “double agency,” in which God and man act to produce the same effect, though in different ways. Thomas sees this as an implication of the doctrine of creation: “It is always by divine power that the human agent produces his or her own proper effect: that is the doctrine of creation. It is not superfluous, even if in principle God can by himself produce all natural effects, for them to be produced by us as causes. Nor is this a result of the inadequacy of divine power, as one might be tempted to think, thus giving way to the charms of process theology. On the contrary: it is a result of the immensity of God’s goodness ( bonitas : bounty). It is another implication of the doctrine of creation that God wills to communicate his likeness to things not only so that they might simply exist but that they might cause other things. Indeed, this is how creatures generally attain the divine likeness – by causing.”

Several comments: First, this suggests that the problem with notions of “cooperation” arise only when the cooperating human being is seen as bringing some independent contribution to the table. If my contribution to some result is produced by something wholly from me, then cooperation endangers the sovereignty of God. But when we recognize, as Thomas does, that we have no independent contribution to make, and that our actions are always already enabled by God, then the problem with cooperation seems to vanish. We work because God works in us; that, as the Westminster Confession says, does not remove the reality of secondary causes but establishes their reality.

Second, I suspect that there is an issue of Trinitarian theology here. Perhaps it’s this: Double agency is inherent in Trinitarian patterns of thinking, evident in the axiom that opera ad extra indivisa sunt . Double agency seems problematic only when we begin from a unitarian position. I don’t know if there’s anything to that, but I smell some Trinitarian issues in the vicinity of the debate over cooperation.