Autor: Stebbins, J. Michael

Buch: The Divine Initiative

Titel: The Divine Initiative

Stichwort: Wirkursache - Wirkung -> transzendent - normal

Kurzinhalt: ordinary and transcendent efficacy; transcendent efficacy positively excludes a necessary nexus between cause and effect

Textausschnitt: 17/8 To the four distinctions already applied to the notion of efficacy, Lonergan adds a fifth: that between ordinary and transcendent efficacy (DES:117). Ordinary efficacy 'is grounded in a necessary causal nexus between cause and effect.' The meaning of this statement is easy enough to grasp, as can be seen by considering any efficacious finite cause, A, and its effect, B. To say that A is efficacious is to affirm that A produces B necessarily, irresistibly, without fail. In this case one is not simply affirming that agent and patient are mutually related in such a way that A can, and in fact does, produce B; one is also making the further affirmation that, given the particular make-up of A, and given the particular interrelation between A and the patient in which it produces B, the existence or occurrence of A causes the existence or occurrence of B necessarily. A and its relation to the patient constitute a necessary causal nexus; in this situation, the effect, B, cannot but emerge. Thus, perfect knowledge of A in its concrete situation yields infallible knowledge of B. (257; Fs)

18/8 Transcendent efficacy, however, is something altogether different. It pertains to an efficient cause which, though it produces its effect efficaciously, does so without benefit of any necessary nexus between itself and the effect (DES:117) - an arresting idea, to say the least, since efficacy implies some sort of necessity. On the basis of this definition Lonergan elaborates the key difference, 'a difference of the greatest moment,' between ordinary and transcendent efficacy (DES:118). A cause endowed with ordinary efficacy cannot give rise to a contingent effect, for by definition the effect follows from the cause by reason of a necessary, rather than a contingent, nexus. But transcendent efficacy positively excludes a necessary nexus between cause and effect; as a consequence, knowing that a cause possesses transcendent efficacy does not give one grounds for concluding that it cannot produce contingent effects. (257f; Fs) (notabene)

19/8 The unique instance of a transcendent cause is God: (258; Fs)
God creates not necessarily but freely; from the fact that God exists it does not follow that any creature exists necessarily; from the fact that God is known perfectly in himself, it does not follow that any creature is known as actually existing; for God is entitatively the same whether he does or does not create. (DES:117) (notabene)
20/8 Hence, it is incorrect to conclude that, as an absolutely and antecedently efficacious cause, God cannot produce a contingent effect. Instead, as Aquinas maintains, just as every other efficient cause produces the mode of its effects, so too God causes some effects to emerge necessarily and others contingently, according to the divine plan: (258; Fs)
Since the divine will is supremely efficacious, it follows not only that those things happen which God wills to happen, but also that they happen in the manner in which God wills them to happen. But God wills some things to happen necessarily and others contingently, so that things may be ordered to the wholeness of the universe. For this reason he has furnished some effects with necessary causes which cannot fail, from which the effects arise of necessity; but he has supplied other effects with contingent and defectible causes, from which the effects proceed contingently. Therefore, effects willed by God do not come about contingently because their proximate causes are contingent, but because God has willed them to come about contingently and has prepared contingent causes for them. (notabene)

21/8 There are no limits to God's freedom to create. Whatever the divine intellect conceives as actual, whatever the divine will intends as actual, actually exists in exactly the manner that God conceives and wills it. Hence, because God's absolute and antecedent efficacy is transcendent, it is consistent with a world-order marked by elements of contingence, including the occurrence of formally free acts. (258; Fs)