Mark K. Spencer

Divine Causality and Created Freedom: A Thomistic Personalist View

Thomas Aquinas argues that God causes all beings other than himself and moves all of them to all their acts, including causing us and moving us to our free acts. This claim is connected to the set of issues surrounding the relation between created freedom and divine providence, predestination, and grace. A strong defender of the freedom of created persons, such as a Thomistic personalist, might reject this aspect of Aquinas’s account and contend that to be free is to be “lord of one’s acts” (dominus sui actus). By this, the personalist would understand that the created free person is the ultimate determinant of whether he or she acts (I refer to this, following the Thomistic tradition, as the “exercise” of the act) and of what he or she does in those acts (the “content” or “specification” of the act). Throughout this article, I shall refer to the last sentence as the “personalist thesis”