In my second post on omni-instrumentality I said the following with respect to God’s essential cooperation with the natural powers of his creatures:

… the influences of both God and creature on the final product are direct (or immediate), complete, and total, but according to different modes. That is, they both extend to the final product (direct/immediate), to all of the final product (complete), and to every detail of the final product (total), but not in the same way (different modes). It’s because they contribute according to different modes that both God and creature can influence the effect without rendering the other superfluous.

The difference, I claimed, lies in the fact that the creature causes the effect whereas God causes the causing of the effect. God is the divine agent whereas the creature is the divine instrument. Given the breadth of topics covered in that post, it’s understandable that I didn’t spend too much time dwelling on this point. Nevertheless, it is a puzzling claim to make and reader Mashsha’i has drawn attention to this in comments on the post. After some back and forth with Mashsha’i in the comments, I’ve decided it’s worth to put my thoughts together in a short follow-up post.

Starting with an imperfect but intuitive example, imagine Alice and Bob are hanging up a big painting. This can work in at least three ways, which correspond to the three modes of cooperation. First, it could be that the two of them are holding the painting together at the right height while trying to hook it against the wall, which would be coordinate cooperation. Second, it could be that Alice gave Bob the painting as a gift which he is hanging it up himself, which would be accidental cooperation. And third, it could be that Bob is busy holding up the painting while Alice instructs him how to move so as to get the painting in the correct position, which would be essential cooperation — by guiding him Alice causes Bob to cause the painting to hang properly.

With these three cases in hand, we may ask: in which of them is Alice directly involved in the hanging of the painting? At least in the first two scenarios the answer is clear: Alice is directly involved in the case of coordinate cooperation, and only indirectly involved in the case of accidental cooperation. But what about the essential cooperation? It seems to me that there is a sense in which Alice is directly involved in the hanging — since the hanging of the painting occurs by virtue of her and Bob working together — but it is equally clear that this cannot be the same sense which applies in the coordinate cooperation.¹

Reflecting on the painting example, I think we can distinguish between two senses of what it means to be “directly involved”. Something is directly involved in the production of an effect if (1) it directly contributes to the effect, or (2) is contributes to an act which directly brings about the effect. These two senses are not incompatible but neither are they coextensive: whenever we have (1) we also have (2), but not vice versa. In the coordinate cooperation, both Alice and Bob directly influence the motion of the painting, and so both (1) and (2) are true of both Alice and Bob. In the accidental cooperation, both (1) and (2) are true of Bob, and neither are true of Alice. And in the essential cooperation, both Alice and Bob contribute to the act of hanging the painting but only Bob directly influences the motion of the painting, meaning that (1) and (2) are true of Bob but only (2) is true of Alice.

Using the categories of my post on cooperation, what’s common between these two senses of direct involvement is that there is combination between Alice and Bob in the production of the final product. Within this commonality, the difference between the two lies in the fact that coordinate cooperation is combination without dependence while essential cooperation is combination with dependence. The introduction of dependence in essential cooperation means that of the two things cooperating in the act, the second cause will directly contribute to the effect while the first cause will merely contribute to the act that directly brings about the effect.

In the case of God’s essential cooperation with nature, we can say two things. First, the sort of direct involvement he has in the final product of the cooperation will be the second one outlined above, but with an important qualification: apart from the particular way in which Bob depends on Alice in our essential cooperation example, he is largely independent of her; on the other hand, a creature is entirely dependent upon God for all of its being. Thus, the “distance” between Alice and Bob is far greater than that between God and the creature.

Second, while I was right (in my post on concurrence) to say that God is directly involved in the production of final products, I was wrong to equate “direct” with “immediate”. In the cooperation, God is directly involved in the production of the effect precisely by virtue of mediating his causal power through the creature in the act which directly brings about the effect.² Thus, while God is directly involved in the production of the effect, his involvement is mediated rather than immediate. In fact, this might well another way of characterizing the difference between the two senses of direct involvement: the first sense involves direct and immediate involvement, while the latter direct and mediated involvement.

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1. In my post on cooperation I defined “direct” as “having no intermediate product” (“This occurs between two things when a product arises directly from the influence of both of them, which is to say that there are no intermediate products between the causes and their mutual product”), but we still need to explain the difference between coordinate and essential cooperation in this respect.↩
2. The qualification “in the cooperation” is important, for there are many cases in which God does immediately cause the effect. For instance, parents mediate the becoming of a child, but God immediately causes its continued being.↩