Natural Theology — Conclusions
The conclusions of Glenn's Theodicy set out as numbered theses, with the demonstrations compressed to their premise chains and intra-scholastic disputes marked.
Tract: Theodicy (Natural Theology) · Paul J. Glenn · 1938 · 18 articles in three Books School: Thomist Depends on: Metaphysics — act and potency (Th. 5–6), essence and existence (Th. 9–10), the four causes (Th. 29)
What this tract is for
Theodicy asks what unaided reason can establish about God from the effects He produces. Its formal object is God as self-existent First Cause and ultimate Final End; not God as revealed, and not God as believed. Everything here is argued from creatures. It is the crown of the philosophical curriculum because it is the only science whose object is reached by inference alone — we have no direct access to it whatever.
The architecture
Unlike Ontology, which classifies, this tract demonstrates, and the order is a dependency chain:
- Book I — That God is. Establish the question is real; show God’s existence is not self-evident (so demonstration is needed) and is not undemonstrable (so demonstration is possible); then run the proofs a posteriori, from effect to cause.
- Book II — What God is. From the conclusion of Book I — a First, self-existent, uncaused Cause — derive God’s physical essence (pure act) and metaphysical essence (subsistent being), then read the attributes off them.
- Book III — What God does. From the essence and attributes, derive God’s immanent operations (intellect, will) and His transient operations toward the world (creation, conservation, concurrence, providence).
The chain is strict. Book II is not a separate inquiry but an unpacking of what “First Uncaused Cause” must mean, and Book III unpacks what a being of that nature must do. Every attribute in Book II is derived from pure actuality; if that identification fails, the whole of Books II and III fails with it.
Book I — The Existence of God
1. God’s existence is a genuine philosophical question, answerable by natural reason and not merely a matter of sentiment or convention. Four positions are distinguished: theism (to be demonstrated); dogmatic atheism, which positively denies (no serious philosopher defends it); practical atheism, which treats God as irrelevant whatever the metaphysics; and agnosticism, which holds God unknown or unknowable. → B1 C1 A1 — The Question of God’s Existence
2. God’s existence is not self-evident to the human mind in its present condition. Against Ontologism and against Anselm’s argument in its immediate form. Glenn’s three arguments: the Infinite cannot be the connatural proportionate object of a finite mind; the constant co-operation of imagination with intellect would be inexplicable if we read essences off a direct idea of God; and direct intuition of God would constitute beatitude, which is manifestly not our state. → B1 C1 A1, A2
3. Therefore demonstration must be a posteriori — from effect to cause — not a priori. This is a formal constraint on everything that follows, and it is why the proofs all begin from something observed. → B1 C1 A2 — The Need and Possibility of Demonstrating God’s Existence
4. Demonstration is possible — against agnosticism and against traditionalism (which grants God’s existence but holds our certitude of it comes from a primitive revelation handed down, not from reasoning). The causal relation between God and the world is real, and every creature bears in its being the legible mark of dependence on its Cause. → B1 C1 A2
5. Demonstration is also necessary in practice. Though the truth is in principle accessible to unaided reason, passion, practical distraction, and the sheer difficulty of sustained metaphysical reasoning mean most people would never reach firm philosophical knowledge of it without it. → B1 C1 A2
6. The Principle of Causality carries the demonstrations: no effect is efficiently produced without an adequate producing or efficient cause. Cause is carefully distinguished from principle, reason, and occasion, and the chief types of cause are divided as intrinsic to the effect (material, formal) and extrinsic to it (efficient, final) — God being shown in what follows to be the supreme Efficient and the last Final Cause of all creation. → B1 C2 A1 — The Chief Types of Causes
The demonstrations
7. Three proofs from efficient causality — Glenn presents them in the order St Thomas sets them out, as applications of one principle: no effect is efficiently produced without an adequate producing or efficient cause. He considers efficient causality as manifested in motion, in the subordination or order of causes, and in contingency, and states that any one of the three is conclusive while their cumulative force is compelling. The contingency argument runs:
(i) Contingent beings exist — beyond serious doubt. (ii) Every contingent being requires an efficient cause, since it does not exist of itself. (iii) The series cannot regress infinitely in essentially subordinated causes: an infinite regress of dependent causes explains nothing, since removing the first removes all the rest. (iv) ∴ There exists a First Efficient Cause, uncaused and self-existent — a being whose existence follows from its own nature.
The objection that the world itself might be self-existent is answered: matter is contingent, quantified, and changing, and none of these marks can belong to a self-existent being. → B1 C2 A2 — The Proof from Efficient Causality
8. Proof from grades of perfection: observable degrees of goodness, truth and nobility require an absolute maximum as their standard and source. → B1 C2 A3
9. Proof from the government of the world (the teleological argument): natural agents act consistently for determinate ends without intellect or foresight; what cannot direct itself to an end must be directed by another; ∴ a supremely intelligent First Designer and Governor. → B1 C2 A3
10. Proof from man’s ultimate goal: man necessarily tends toward an ultimate end — the Supreme Good and perfect happiness — which no finite thing can supply; a natural tendency toward an infinite Good requires that the infinite Good exist. → B1 C2 A3 — The Proof from Formal and Final Causality
11. Three supplementary proofs reinforce but do not replace the above: the moral proof (universal awareness of binding obligation requires a supreme Lawgiver and Judge); the historical proof from universal consent; and the indirect proof, that atheism destroys the foundations of moral law, human dignity, responsibility and civil society. Glenn is explicit that these are convergent supports, not independent demonstrations — which matters, because they are the ones most often quoted as though they carried the weight alone. → B1 C2 A4 — Certain Supplementary Proofs
Book II — The Nature of God
12. God’s physical essence is pure act (actus purus): no potentiality, no admixture of non-being, no capacity to be otherwise. → B2 C1 A1 — The Physical Essence of God
13. Four fundamental perfections are established here: unity (with uniqueness or unicity — there can be only one unlimited Being), simplicity (what is composed of parts has potentiality), infinity (limitation comes from potentiality), and spirituality. Immutability and eternity are established later, in the article of Th. 19. This derivation is the spine of the whole Book. → B2 C1 A1
14. Pantheism is refuted from pure act — the changeable world cannot be identical with the changeless God. (Deism is treated separately, among the theories listed in B1 C1 A1, not here.) → B2 C1 A1
15. God’s metaphysical essence is Subsistent Being Itself (ipsum esse subsistens). ⚠ One of five doctrines; see disputed points. The argument: the metaphysical essence is that note which first makes a thing intelligible and explains the properties that must be attributed to it — and God’s self-subsistence is what answers why He is First Cause, necessary, infinite, simple, one. → B2 C1 A2 — The Metaphysical Essence of God
16. In God, essence and existence are identical. Creatures have being by participation; God is being by identity. This is the far side of the real distinction established in Ontology — the two theses are one doctrine stated from either end. → B2 C1 A2
17. The divine attributes are really identical with the essence and with each other, distinguished only virtually — by different conceptual considerations of one infinite reality. In creatures, attributes are genuinely distinct from essence; in God there is no real composition, so the distinction is a concession to the finite mind, which can take only one perfection at a time. → B2 C2 A1 — The Divine Attributes in General
18. Attributes divide into absolute and relative: absolute considered without reference to creatures (subdivided into positive, affirming a perfection, and negative, denying an imperfection); relative involving God’s relation to creatures, such as providence and omnipresence. → B2 C2 A1
19. Four attributes demonstrated individually: goodness — pure act has no lack, so God is the Summum Bonum; immensity and omnipresence — God is present everywhere operatively and incircumscriptively, by power, by knowledge, and by essence, not as a body occupying space nor as a substantial form (against pantheism); immutability; and eternity. → B2 C2 A2 — The Divine Attributes in Special
Book III — The Operations of God
20. God’s intellect is not a faculty added to the divine substance but identical with it. God knows Himself perfectly in one infinite intuitive act; His self-knowledge is His being. → B3 C1 A1 — The Operations of God’s Intellect
21. God knows creatures by knowing Himself as their exemplary and efficient cause. The divine ideas are the eternal archetypes of all creatable reality — and they induce no plurality in God, because the finite mind alone requires a distinct species for each object known; in God the sole species is the divine essence itself. → B3 C1 A1
22. Divine knowledge divides into two classes, not three: knowledge of simple intelligence (all possibles) and knowledge of vision (all that has been, is, or will be). ⚠ Glenn rejects scientia media as an unnecessary third classification: futuribilia fall under simple intelligence, and distinctions in divine knowledge are not to be multiplied without distinct objects to require them. On foreknowledge of future contingents he follows Cajetan, finding Molina and Bañez less acceptable. See disputed points. → B3 C1 A1
23. Divine foreknowledge does not destroy human freedom, and the difficulty here is only apparent — knowledge does not create or cause its object. Glenn is explicit that the real difficulty lies not in foreknowledge but in concurrence (Th. 28–29). → B3 C1 A1
24. God’s will is infinite, holy, and free. He necessarily wills His own infinite goodness; He freely wills creatures, since His perfection is complete without them. His love for creatures is pure benevolence, without any admixture of concupiscence — He does not need to possess them. → B3 C1 A2 — The Operations of God’s Will
25. God is a person in the philosophical sense — a subsistent being of rational nature. Reason demonstrates that God is personal, not an impersonal force or cosmic process. It can neither demonstrate nor disprove the Trinity, which is left to faith. (This is the boundary marker of the whole tract: the point at which natural theology states its own limit.) → B3 C1 A3 — The Personal Nature of God
26. Creation ex nihilo is possible, actual, and free, proceeding from intellect and will rather than blind emanation. Emanationism — the view, in Cousin and Ferri, that God draws creatures out of Himself — is rejected as pantheistic in implication. → B3 C2 A1 — The Divine Operation of Creation
27. Creation is proper to God alone, and cannot be communicated to creatures even instrumentally: to produce substance without pre-existing material requires a will independent of all materials, and only an infinite will is such. → B3 C2 A1
28. Conservation is not a second act but the one continuous creative act. Creatures, being contingent, have no power to maintain their own being. Cessation of conservation would not be active destruction but simple withdrawal of support — creatures would lapse into nothing of themselves. → B3 C2 A2 — The Divine Operation of Conservation
29. Divine concurrence is a fact, proved three ways: from the contingency of creatures in operation as well as in being; from the order of causes manifest in creatural effects (every effect is wholly the creature’s as secondary cause and wholly God’s as primary cause, from respectively distinct viewpoints); and from the reference of all being and perfection to the All-Perfect. God concurs as First Efficient Cause, Ultimate Final Cause, and Radical Formal Cause. → B3 C2 A3 — The Divine Operation of Concurrence
30. The mode of concurrence in free acts is disputed; the fact is not. ⚠ See disputed points — this is the most carefully hedged passage in the tract. → B3 C2 A3
31. Providence is God’s eternal plan for ordering all creatures to their ends; governance is its execution in time through secondary causes. Providence is universal: nothing escapes it, not even genuinely free choices, which God infallibly foresees and incorporates without overriding. Cosmic chance — ultimate disorder at the level of the whole — is excluded by the demonstrated rationality of the Creator. → B3 C2 A4 — Governance and Providence
32. On evil: physical evil is permitted as the condition of higher goods and as the unavoidable accompaniment of limited creaturely nature. Moral evil God permits without causing — sin is the deficiency of a free creature’s act, not a positive reality. (This rests directly on Ontology Th. 16: evil is privation, and its cause is deficient, not efficient.) → B3 C2 A4
Disputed points
The mode of divine concurrence in free acts (Th. 30) — the largest dispute in the tract, and the one Glenn is most careful with.
Before presenting the theories he fixes three points he says are not, and cannot be, in controversy: God is the sole Author of being and is a true and total cause in every creatural operation; man is truly free and is the responsible author of his moral acts; God is in no sense the cause of sin, which is a defection from being rather than a positive reality.
| Molinist | Physical Premotionist | |
|---|---|---|
| Concurrence is | immediate, moral, indifferent in itself, simultaneous, extrinsic | physical, previous, immediate, special, intrinsic |
| Mechanism | God foresees by scientia media how man will freely choose, and makes His indifferent concurrence efficacious simultaneously with the free act | God premoves the will by a physical predetermination that moves it to determine itself freely, since God moves each being in a manner consistent with its nature |
| Objection raised against it | Slights God’s supreme and necessary operation; seems to make man the determiner of God’s action | Makes freedom needlessly mysterious — though opponents grant it vindicates the First Mover’s necessary place |
Glenn declines to argue it out (“the point controverted is one for the specialist”) and closes by saying that if he dares an opinion, reason seems strongly to favour the Premotionist position, on the ground that only the premotion of the First Mover can be the absolute beginning of any creatural movement whatever.
One detail worth carrying: both schools claim harmony with Aquinas, and Glenn notes that the name Thomist is nonetheless generally applied to the Premotionists only.
Middle knowledge (Th. 22) — Glenn rejects scientia media outright, not as a permitted alternative but as an unnecessary classification, invoking the axiom that things are not to be multiplied without necessity. He is careful to affirm that God certainly knows the futuribilia (citing Christ on Tyre and Sidon) and quotes Boedder SJ conceding that what the term means may be held without retaining the term. On divine foreknowledge generally he prefers Cajetan — that God knows future contingents in His own essence as present, consequent upon His eternal decrees — over both Molina and Bañez.
The metaphysical essence of God (Th. 15) — five doctrines are canvassed. Glenn favours “the more common Thomistic doctrine” of subsistent being. He rejects actual aseity as the metaphysical essence, on the ground that it distinguishes God from other things without presenting Him in His root being; he accepts radical aseity as synonymous with his own position.
Key terms
— actus purus · pure actuality
— ipsum esse subsistens · subsistent being itself
— ens a se · being of itself, aseity
— tota simul · all at once, of eternity
— scientia simplicis intelligentiae · knowledge of simple intelligence, of possibles
— scientia visionis · knowledge of vision, of actuals
— scientia media · middle knowledge, of conditionally future free acts
— futuribilia · conditionally future events
— ex nihilo · from nothing
— agens per intellectum · intelligent agent, as against agens per naturam
Reading it properly
The proofs are the tract. Th. 7 above is a four-line skeleton of an argument Glenn spends an article building, and the load is carried entirely by premise (iii) — the impossibility of infinite regress in essentially subordinated causes. If you read one thing here in full, read that. Th. 29–30 is the second: Glenn’s treatment of concurrence is the model for how a manual should handle a question it declines to settle.