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Thomas Aquinas and Alfred North Whitehead on God‘s Action in the World

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Hosinski T. E.

Open Theology

2014

vol. 1

issue 1

Thomas Aquinas’ intentions in his position that God acts through secondary causes are both laudable and correct. In affirming God’s action within secondary causes Thomas intended to affirm true freedom and contingency in the world and the creatures’ limited participation in God’s creative power. But his interpretation of these topics rests on assumptions about divinity that subvert his intentions. This article summarizes Thomas’ analysis and discusses the principal difficulties with his interpretation of God’s action. It then presents an interpretation of how Alfred North Whitehead’s position on divine action avoids these difficulties and achieves a more coherent understanding of God’s action in the world, even though it too requires revision. If Whitehead’s metaphysics is revised to think of creativity as the divine life rather than as ultimately distinct from God, then it, too, presents God as sharing the divine life with creatures by endowing them with the creativity and freedom to create themselves on the divinely-given ground of possibility. Thomas’ intentions and a revised Whiteheadian interpretation of divine action are compatible and complement each other on the topic of divine action in and through creatures and on the idea of existence as participation in the divine life.

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1 Open Theology

1 Hosinski T. E.

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Thomas Aquinas and Alfred North Whitehead on God‘s Action in the World