Abridged from “Governor
Cuomo and God’s Noncompetitive Transcendence”
By Bishop Robert Barron
Last week, Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, made a
rather interesting theological observation. Commenting on the progress that his
state has made in fighting the coronavirus, and praising the concrete efforts
of medical personnel and ordinary citizens, he said, “The number is down
because we brought the number down. God did not do that. Faith did not do
that.”
The condition for the possibility of the governor’s
declaration is the assumption that God is one competitive cause among many, one
actor jostling for position and time upon the stage with a coterie of other
actors. On this reading, God does certain things—usually of a rather spectacular
nature—and creaturely causes do other things, usually more mundane.
[E]verything is, at once, natural and supernatural—precisely
because God’s causality is operating noncompetitively, on a qualitatively
different level than creaturely causality. If you want a one-liner summary of
this distinctively biblical perspective, you could not do better than this,
from the prophet Isaiah: “O Lord, it is you who have accomplished all that we
have done” (Isa. 26:12).
God is not the supreme being (ens summum in his Latin), but rather ipsum esse subsistens, which means
“the sheer act of to be itself.” (St Thomas Aquinas) … Therefore, God does not
compete for space, so to speak, on the same ontological grid as creatures; a
zero-sum game does not obtain in regard to God’s activity and creaturely
activity—the more we ascribe to one, the less we have to ascribe to the other.
Allow me to ground this rather abstract rhetoric with a very
homely example. If one were to ask what is necessary to make a bicycle, the
response would be something like this: “tires, brake pads, a chain, a metal
frame, the skill of the builder, perhaps a schematic to guide the building
process, etc.” No one would ever be tempted to respond as follows:
“tires, brake pads, a chain, God, a metal frame, the skill of the builder,
etc.” And yet, a smart religious person, upon finishing the project of
constructing that bike, would quite legitimately say, “Thank God!” The prayer
would be a humble acknowledgement, not that God in a fussily invasive way
interfered with the building process, but that God is responsible for the
entire nexus of causes and behaviors that made up the process. The upshot is
that the two dimensions of causality—one finite and the other
transcendent—operate simultaneously and noncompetitively: “You have accomplished
all that we have done.”
All of which brings me back to Governor Cuomo. To claim that
“God did not do that” because we did it is simply a category mistake. What
brought the coronavirus numbers down? It is perfectly accurate to say,
“The skill of doctors and nurses, the availability of hospital beds, the
willingness of so many to shelter in place, etc.” But it is also perfectly
valid to say that God brought those numbers down…
[Consider] the psychological motivation of those dedicated
physicians and nurses. Why ultimately were they willing to do what they did? I
would be willing to bet a large percentage of them would say that it was a
desire to serve others and to be pleasing to God.
