Abstract

Thomas Aquinas’s engagement with newly received Arabic commentaries on Aristotle and Neoplatonic ideas shaped his distinct approach to God’s action in the world. Aquinas understood divine providence as encompassing God as first cause and contingent secondary created causes, contributing to a richer, more perfect world. This moderate indeterminism, based on the fourfold causes of Aristotle, lets Aquinas uphold a primary cause that, while causing secondary causes to cause contingently, causes their effects without determining their outcome. When Aristotelian philosophy, inspired in part by biological prototypes, was replaced by the mechanical philosophies during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the interplay between primary and secondary causes became problematic, resulting in occasionalist or deist positions.