Concurrence versus Conservation, Divine

Summary

On the traditional Scholastic view that has its source in the work of Thomas Aquinas, there is a distinction between God's “conservation” of the being of an object, which allows that object to continue to remain in existence, and his “concurrence” with the action of an object, by which he acts with that object to produce its effect. According to Thomas, God's conservation of an object is merely the continuation of his act of creating that object. The early modern Scholastic Francisco Suárez (1967, I 792) expresses this as the claim that there is a mere “distinction of reason” between conservation and creation (see distinction [real, modal, and rational]).

Thomas also offers his view of divine concurrence as a response to medieval occasionalists who claim that God is the only real causal agent in nature. There is in Thomas a “causal compatibilism” (this term is from Perler and Rudoph 2000, 154), according to which God operates through secondary causes to produce the effects of those causes. On the one hand, this view allows Thomas to hold, contra the occasionalists, that secondary causes make a genuine causal contribution to the production of their effect. On the other hand, the view allows him to say that this contribution is subordinated to God's contribution to this production as the primary cause of the effects. It therefore differs from the “conservationist” position – defended in the fourteenth century by Durandus of Saint Pourçain – that God's contribution to the natural operations of created agents is exhausted by his creation and conservation of those agents.

Descartes invokes the Scholastic notions of conservation and concurrence in his discussion of God's role in physics as “the universal and primary cause of motion.” In the Principles of Philosophy II.36, he holds that God, in his role as primary cause, creates and, “by his ordinary concursus alone,” conserves a particular total “quantity of motion” (AT VIIIA 61, CSM I 240) (see conservation of motion, principle of).