Scripture's God acts: a true agent who wills, chooses, and intervenes in history. An act, examined, needs a real alternative it picks out (this done *rather than* that) and a path from not-yet-done to done. A single eternal act with no unactualized alternatives is not the most concentrated agency; it is indistinguishable from a static fact that simply follows from God's nature. The believer's "let this cup pass" asks for a difference such an act has none of.

*What the tradition holds.* The classical doctrine of divine agency assembles several reinforcing claims. God is *actus purus*, pure act, with no potency, no transition, no movement from could-be-willing to is-willing (Aquinas, *ST* I.3, I.19). God's willing is identical with God's being; the willing and the willed are one eternal act (Augustine, *De Trinitate* XV; Aquinas, *ST* I.19). God acts in history (election, exodus, incarnation, resurrection) and answers prayer, and works miracles in which divine causation overrides ordinary causal regularity (Hume, David, (1748) 1999); (Richard Swinburne, 1970); (Robert A. Larmer, 2014).

On the most developed contemporary refinements, the eternal divine act stands in ET-simultaneity (eternal-temporal simultaneity: the relation by which an eternal being is present, in full, to every temporal moment alike) (Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981); (Leftow, Brian, 1991); (Leftow, Brian, 2012). Divine causation is *primitive* rather than a special case of structural causation (Hugh J. McCann, 2012); (Stump, Eleonore, 2016). Divine sovereignty extends to the modal structure within which acts are intelligible at all (Leftow, Brian, 2012). Open theism takes the reverse turn and pulls God back into time, allowing genuine response to creaturely action (Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975); (William Hasker, 1989); (Mullins, R. T., 2016).

Each move tries to keep agency from being a creaturely capacity writ large. At its most ambitious, the doctrine names a being whose every doing is one eternal act, whose sovereignty extends to the modal structure within which doing is intelligible at all, and whose creatures' acting is held within the divine causing without compromising its being theirs.

*What cannot be answered.* Seven questions ask of divine agency what, in the form structural reasoning can take up, it cannot answer. What lies beneath them is the structural analysis the section's argument depends on. An act is the actualization of one determinate state rather than another: the hand reaches rather than not-reaching; the reaching is the agent's; the not-reaching is a real alternative until the reaching displaces it. Agency, on this minimal description, has a modal-structural profile before it has a temporal one. There must be a contrast between actualized and unactualized alternatives (done and not-done, this rather than that) for the resulting state to be an act rather than a static fact. Where the contrast is realized in time, agency runs through a transition (T) between not-yet-having-acted and having-acted, an interval (S) across which the doing is launched and at which it lands, and a substantial being (Φ) in whom the doing originates and through which its influence runs. The deeper condition is the modal contrast itself: an act is intelligible only against an unactualized alternative. The same analysis explains why freedom cannot mean unconstrained origination. An act is free only where there is a live alternative for the agent to model and a persisting agent able to participate in which alternative becomes actual. At the instant of reaction, agency contracts into embodied response; with distance from the action, the agent can hold more alternatives in view, compare consequences, revise impulse, and reshape the field in which later acts will occur. Freedom, on this analysis, is the degree to which a self-modeling agent can participate in the selection of one live possibility among alternatives. The seven pressures run two at the level of the predicate, five at the level of the conditions agency-talk runs on. [§6.8.3](<6.8.3 Describability.md>) takes up the analogical and apophatic replies in the form they have in the literature.

**Q1.** *How does God intend this rather than that, if there is no "that" left undone?* For an intention to be the intention to do *this* rather than *that*, there must be a real alternative: a determinate state the agent does not actualize, set against the determinate state the agent does actualize. The contrast is constitutive: an intention is the agent's selection of one alternative over another, and where there is no unactualized alternative there is no selection. *Actus purus* (Aquinas, *ST* I.19) forecloses the contrast deliberately: in God there is no potency, no unrealized alternative, no movement from could-be-willing-otherwise to is-willing-this, only the single eternal act in which willing and being are identical. The Thomist's standard reply is that the worry conflates active power with passive potency: God has unlimited active power without unrealized passive potency. The reformulation does not turn on Aristotelian potency. It turns on modal contrast. Active power is power-to-actualize-this-rather-than-that. Strip the contrast (remove every unactualized alternative) and what remains is not a more concentrated form of agency but a static eternal fact, indistinguishable from a logical entailment between the divine essence and what follows from it. The believer who prays "let this cup pass" is asking for a difference between an actualized and an unactualized alternative; the eternal act with no internal contrast has no such difference to give. Stump -(Stump, Eleonore, 2003) and Dolezal -(Dolezal, James E., 2017) defend the position by treating *intention* analogically; the present analysis registers the move and presses the cost: the analogical reading preserves the term by removing what the term tracks.

Hartshorne's dipolar account addresses Q1 by locating agency in the concrete pole: the concrete pole's acts are genuine intentional acts, involving directed transition, modal contrast, and responsive selection among the open alternatives creaturely co-creation supplies. The abstract pole provides the invariant structure within which the concrete pole's agency runs; the concrete pole provides the modal contrast Q1 requires. The concern here is the one [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) presses, in the local form of an agency dilemma: if the composite subject's acts belong to the concrete pole, the concrete pole is a temporal, T-instantiating being whose acts have all the structural features Q1 identifies; if the concrete pole's acts are not the composite subject's acts, the abstract pole bears an acting subject at one remove across the pole-relation: the directed crossing [§5.3.3](<5.3.3 Process Theology.md>) shows obtains within T, S, and Φ. Either way the agent the doctrine's predicates are about instantiates the structural conditions rather than escaping them.

**Q2.** *What does God choose in willing the best, if the best leaves nothing else open to will?* For a willing to be a choice rather than a computation, the willing must be undetermined by the inputs that supply its content: the ranking over options must permit divergence, the selection rule must not return a single output, or the agent must have a remainder to contribute that goes beyond what the ranking and the option set already fix. The classical doctrine fixes all three. The ranking is the divine nature, identified with the good (Aquinas, *ST* I.19.1; Augustine, *De Trinitate* VIII). The option set is the modal landscape, fixed independently of the willing ([§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>); [§2.3](<2.3 Necessary Possibility of Change.md>)). The selection rule is *wills what is best*, formalized in Leibniz's principle that God selects the *best of all possible worlds* (*Théodicée* 1710). The structural concern is what this preserves of *choice*. A selection determined by a fixed ranking over a fixed option set with a deterministic selection rule is the output of a function, not the act of an agent: the verbs *chooses* and *computes* become interchangeable without remainder. Spinoza recognizes that the doctrine, taken in its strongest form, collapses Leibnizian optimism into necessitarianism, the view that nothing could have been otherwise and whatever is the case is so necessarily (*Ethics* I, prop. 33), and the contemporary literature has not closed the line: Adams -(Robert Merrihew Adams, 1972), Rowe -(William L. Rowe, 2004), and Kraay -(Klaas J. Kraay, 2010) develop the no-best-world variant, in which the selection rule has no determinate output to track, the theological form of *Buridan's ass*: a rational will offered options among which its own rule fixes no unique winner, and so unable to select without selecting arbitrarily; Aquinas himself concedes the possibility (*ST* I.25.6, ad 1). The compatibilist reply (divine freedom is action from one's own nature without external constraint) preserves the term *free* by removing what the term tracks. A thermostat acts from its own nature without external constraint; the compatibilist reading factors out of *free* any sense that distinguishes choosing from executing. Hartshorne proposes an aesthetic-creativity alternative to the Leibnizian best-world framework: God necessarily exemplifies the highest aesthetic order (abstract pole), but the specific content of the best is not pre-fixed: it is the creative synthesis of what creaturely agents have contributed, so that the concrete pole's willing is always the best responsive integration of the world's actual creative advance rather than a selection from a pre-specified menu (*Man's Vision of God*, -(Charles Hartshorne, 1941); *Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method*, -(Charles Hartshorne, 1970)). The concern for the aesthetic-creativity alternative is whether the concrete pole's responsive best-making constitutes a live selection among alternatives or whether the abstract pole's necessary exemplification of the highest aesthetic order determines the concrete pole's response given any world-state, restoring the function-output structure Q2's analysis finds objectionable.

A Frankfurt-style reply might seem to blunt Q1 and Q2 together: if genuine agency does not require live alternate possibilities at all (§E.1.4 develops the point for creaturely freedom via Frankfurt cases (Harry G. Frankfurt, 1969)), then the mere absence of an unactualized alternative should not by itself disqualify the will's act from counting as a choice. The reply does not reach this case, because it trades on a resource *actus purus* does not supply. Frankfurt cases hold the actual sequence fixed: a reasons-responsive process runs from an antecedent state to the act, and it is that process, not the presence of a live alternative, that does the work of grounding responsibility; the counterfactual intervener is idle precisely because the actual mechanism already suffices. Pure act removes the mechanism along with the alternative: there is no antecedent state, no transition from could-be-willing to is-willing, for any actual-sequence theory to locate a process in, since willing and being are numerically one eternal act rather than the terminus of an unfolding history. The objection this section presses is accordingly the stronger of the two available forms it could take. It is not that God lacks alternatives the willing could have gone another way among; it is that God lacks the actual sequence that any theory of freedom, alternate-possibilities or actual-sequence alike, requires an act to issue from.

**Q3.** *From where does an act reach one target rather than another, if the agent is nowhere in particular?* For an act to be directed at a target (for an effect to land on this object rather than that one) there must be a real spatial relation between the agent and the target. The classical reply is that God is omnipresent: present everywhere alike, requiring no specific position to act from. [§6.8.1](<6.8.1 Presence.md>) presses the structural concern with that reply at the level of presence; the present concern is closer in. Action identical at every point appears to lack directional structure. The act either has a directional structure, in which case some position from which the direction is reckoned seems required, or it does not, in which case it is hard to see how the act takes hold on one target rather than another. Inman -(Inman, Ross D., 2017) and Hudson -(Hudson, Hud, 2009) develop the most careful contemporary attempts to preserve directionality without position; the present analysis registers them as the strongest moves available and notes that each preserves directedness by relocating the directional resource to a primitive of divine intention. The relocation keeps the verb and shifts the locus of the difficulty.

**Q4.** *Through what does the influence travel, if there is no medium for it to cross?* For the influence to reach its target, there must be a medium that carries it forward. The classical God, defined as immaterial, is defined as having no medium through which to act. The reply that God acts directly, without intermediate causes, addresses the requirement by relocating it. A direct cause still has a structural relation to its effect. McCann -(Hugh J. McCann, 2012) presses the contrary view: divine causation is genuinely primitive, not a special case of ordinary causation but a category of its own. Pruss develops the parallel analytic-Catholic treatment in *Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds* -(Pruss, A. R., 2011): primitive divine causation is read as the limit case of immediate causation more generally, with the cause-effect relation retained at the level of metaphysical dependence rather than at the level of any intermediating medium. The reply is available and serious. The concern here is what makes primitive divine causation a case of *causation* rather than a homonym. Whatever makes the primitive case a case of the genus depends on retaining enough of the structural relation between cause and effect for the term to apply, and the structural relation is precisely what the doctrine of immateriality has placed beyond God. The reply preserves the term by leaving its application to a primitive whose work the analysis cannot examine.

**Q5.** *What difference does an unchanging, unmoved cause pass on, if it has none of its own to give?* Causation, on the analyses [§2.4](<2.4 Structural Requirement.md>) develops, is the transmission of difference forward through a medium: the cause undergoes a state, and the effect undergoes the corresponding consequent state. A cause that does not itself change has no differential structure to distinguish causing from not-causing; a mover that does not itself move has no motion of its own to transmit. The doctrine meets this difficulty at both ends of its history. At its Aristotelian origin, the Prime Mover (*Metaphysics* XII) is unmoved and yet causes the motion of the celestial spheres, drawing them as the object of desire and final cause; Aquinas absorbs the structure into the First Way (*ST* I.2.3), where the regress of changers-themselves-changed terminates in a first cause that moves without being moved, and the picture has supplied Western theism with its account of divine causation ever since. The desire-as-final-cause solution preserves the asymmetry by relocating the dynamism to the moved party (the spheres move themselves toward the Prime Mover), but appears to do so at the cost of leaving it unclear, in any operative sense, what the first mover *does*: the aspirational object is not the aspiration's cause but its target.

At the contemporary end the same pressure recurs as the bare requirement that a cause bear differential change. Wolterstorff -(Nicholas Wolterstorff, 1975) gives the alternative its canonical form: God is everlasting, not timeless; Hasker -(William Hasker, 1989) and Mullins -(Mullins, R. T., 2016) extend the move into open theism. The repair responds to the concern (a God who undergoes states has differences to transmit), but at the cost that a being who exists through time instantiates T, and a being instantiating T at the moment of acting is one whose acting is an event in time, with the structural commitments that follow. The two replies mark the doctrine splitting along a single structural incompatibility: *actus purus* keeps the changelessness and forfeits the difference there is to transmit, while divine everlastingness keeps the transmissible difference and forfeits the changelessness, relocating God within the conditions the classical doctrine had defined God against. Generalized from the spheres to a creator of the universe, an answerer of prayer, a worker of miracles, the difficulty is the same at both ends: an unchanged source has no difference of its own to pass forward, and a source that has acquired difference enough to pass forward is no longer unchanged.

**Q6.** *What does an eternal act do at any moment, if it occurs at no moment at all?* The atemporalist cascade attempts to preserve divine action without taking on temporal structure. Boethius (*Consolation* V.6) describes eternity as the simultaneous and complete possession of unbounded life. Stump and Kretzmann -(Stump, Eleonore, and Norman Kretzmann, 1981) refine this into ET-simultaneity. Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 1991); -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) sharpens the metaphysics; Rogers -(Rogers, Katherin A., 2000) and Helm -(Helm, Paul, 2010) defend the framework. The concern here is whether ET-simultaneity preserves the act in a sense stronger than the term. The single eternal act does not occur at 3:14 PM on a Tuesday; it stands eternally alongside that moment without the moment's *at* being operative for the eternal agent. Any particular act of intervention has a *when*, and the *when* appears to be part of what the act is. ET-simultaneity preserves causal contact by setting aside the temporal relation that, on the structural analysis, is constitutive of an act's being the act it is. The believer who reports a moment of grace at a specific moment is reporting something whose specificity ET-simultaneity has factored out for the divine pole.

**Q7.** *What does an act author in the realm of the possible, if the possible already holds across every world?* The deepest version of the doctrine extends sovereignty to the modal space itself: God authors what is possible, not merely what is actual. To author the possible, however, is to bring about a state in which what was not possible becomes possible: a transition between modal states. Transitions require T. Modal invariance (§[§2.1.4](<2.1.4 Modal Stability.md>)–2.1.5) sets out the structural difficulty: modal status does not vary across worlds. Leibniz (*Théodicée* 1710) tries to thread this by having God *select* among possibles rather than author them: the best of all possible worlds is chosen, not made. The selection still appears to require sovereignty exercised within a modal structure God did not generate. Leftow -(Leftow, Brian, 2012) develops the most ambitious contemporary attempt to ground modality in God; [§6.3.1](<6.3.1 Necessity.md>), Q6 and [§6.7.1](<6.7.1 Power.md>), Q5 engage it from the necessity and power sides; the present point is that the modal structure appears to function as a condition on God's action rather than as a product of it. The pressure runs in the opposite direction as well. If God is necessarily creator (if creating belongs to God essentially rather than accidentally) then in every world where God exists, God creates; if God exists necessarily, creation is necessary. The Thomist escape distinguishes God's act-considered-in-itself (necessary) from the act's *terminus ad extra* (its term in the external created order, contingent), but on strict simplicity the distinction has no real ground in God: God's act is identical with God's being. Mullins -(Mullins, R. T., 2013); -(Mullins, R. T., 2016) and Tomaszewski -(Tomaszewski, Christopher, 2019) press this from inside the literature. Either creator-status is essential and creation is necessary, in which case the act loses the modal contrast agency requires; or creator-status is contingent and the doctrine has surrendered the necessity of God's being-creator, on which providence and revelation were supposed to rest. The modal result carries the necessity of any essential predicate to whatever the predicate really commits to. The classical doctrine has wanted necessary creator-status and free creation at once. But free creation requires live alternatives, and a being whose essential creator-status necessarily issues in a sustained order lacks the relevant contrast. If the sustaining relation is necessary, Nature is necessary with God; if it is contingent, creatorhood is not necessary in God. The doctrine must choose which claim to surrender. Pruss and Rasmussen's necessary-creating/contingent-order distinction addresses the dichotomy directly (*Necessary Existence*, -(Pruss, Alexander R., and Joshua L. Rasmussen, 2018), ch. 5): God necessarily creates *some* world (creator-status is essential) but creates this particular contingent order among possible alternatives; the necessity attaches to the creator-status, not to the specific creation. The distinction preserves necessary creatorhood without necessitating any particular creation. The concern for the Pruss/Rasmussen reply at Q7 is that the selection among contingent termini is itself a modal-contrast act: what determines which contingent order is actualized? The selection requires the same live-alternative structure Q1 identifies as constitutive of any act, and exercises that structure through a substantial agent (Φ) across an ordering of alternatives (T, S). The necessary-creating/contingent-order distinction moves the chapter's agency concerns from the level of creator-status to the level of the selection, where they apply at full force.

The same pressure appears when creation is considered as a whole. A creator who brings about a reality genuinely other than itself must stand in a determinate relation to the created term. If created reality is external to God, creatorhood is a real outward relation — the directed relation the preceding questions analyze. If created reality is within God, creaturehood becomes a differentiation or modification in divine reality, pressing against simplicity and the Creator–creature distinction. If the relation is real only on the creature's side, the remaining question is what makes *God creates* a determinate explanatory claim rather than a formula for creaturely dependence. The point is not that creatures make an infinite God quantitatively larger; infinity is not a quantity. It is that a genuinely other creation cannot be related to a simple, atemporal God without either restoring a structural relation or withdrawing the positive content of creation.

*What is required.* Seven pressures yield, between them, the structural commitments of *act*. An act is the actualization of one determinate state rather than another, and an act with no transition has no difference for any petition or selection to address; the analogical reading of *intention* preserves the term while removing what the term tracks. The willing has to be undetermined by its inputs for the willing to be a choice rather than a computation; a fixed ranking over a fixed option set with a deterministic selection rule returns the act as the function's output, and the compatibilist redefinition of *free* preserves the term by removing what it tracks. Where the act lands depends on directional structure: action identical at every point lacks the asymmetric agent-target relation along which influence is reckoned, and relocating directedness to a primitive of intention keeps the verb while shifting the locus of the difficulty. The act runs through a structural relation between cause and effect: primitive immaterial causation either retains enough of that relation for the term to apply or leaves the application to a primitive whose work the analysis cannot examine. The cause has to bear differential change: a cause that does not itself change has no difference to transmit, and the open-theist response preserves responsiveness by relocating God within the very conditions the classical doctrine had defined God against. The act has its *when*: the believer's reported moment of grace has a specificity ET-simultaneity factors out on the divine pole, and the *when* the act has appears to be part of what the act is. It runs on a doer, a substantial being in whom doing originates and through which influence travels; the unmoved mover that does not itself change leaves unclear what operative role it plays in the moving the doctrine wants it to do, and a final cause is not the act it is the target of. And the modal structure the doctrine wants to author functions as a condition on action rather than as a product of it: sovereignty that authors the conditions any exercise presupposes is sovereignty exercising the conditions it authors, and the doctrine faces a structural dilemma: either creator-status is necessary and creation is necessary, or creator-status is contingent and the doctrine surrenders the necessity it claimed. T, S, and Φ are the structural conditions any act runs on.

*What is inverted.* Agency is what Nature does when its motion takes hold on its own further configuration. The English *agent* descends through Latin *agere*, *to do, to drive, to lead*. To act is to drive a transition forward, to lead from not-yet to now. The doing requires a doer, an interval to drive across, a doer-being the doing is *of*. [§8.9](<8.9 Will.md>) develops the positive account of agency as directed change of just this kind. The classical tradition reaches for an agent whose acts would be more comprehensive than any creature's, and names a relation whose structural conditions have been removed at every level. The doctrine has not preserved an agent whose reach exceeds the creaturely. It has performed the verb *act* onto a non-being with none of the structure acting consists in. Agency belongs to Nature. What *God acts* names, on the classical predicate read for the structure its own application requires, is a feature of Nature, driving its own further configuration forward, in the only structural relation the verb *act* names.


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← [6.7.1 Power](<6.7.1 Power.md>) | [6.7.3 Interaction](<6.7.3 Interaction.md>) →
