De causa Dei: Book II, Chapter 29
Thomas Bradwardine, De causa Dei contra Pelagium (1344). English translation: Wroot Press, CC BY-NC 4.0; machine-learning use permitted with attribution (https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/rights/).
Source: Henry Savile's edition, London 1618, 577B–577D; Latin from EEBO-TCP A16626 (public domain).
Canonical: https://bradwardine.wrootpress.com/2/29/
Status: draft translation, not yet reviewed.

[577B]
CHAPTER XXIX. That the uncreated will and the created will, in co-effecting an act of the created will, are not equals, nor coeval in the natural order.

[577C–577D]
Now that it has been established that God and the creature act every act of the created will properly and alike, the uncreated will as well as the created, it remains to inquire in consequence whether these two agent causes are, in this their common action, equal in the natural order and coeval, or whether one of them naturally precedes the other, and if so, which one it is. If they are posited as equal in the order of action and naturally coeval, both are reduced to a third, naturally prior to them, through whose agency these two act. For so it is in all things ordered in this way, as all the Philosophers unanimously attest. Some of their testimonies were recited more fully in the first, second, third and fourth of the first, and especially in the proof of the [third] corollary of the second chapter of the first book.[n1] Therefore God, as an agent, has a prior agent cause, by whose power and agency he himself acts. That cause is necessarily not God but a creature. Therefore in the common action of the creature and of God, the creature is prior to God in the order of acting. And if this is true of any creature in any action, it seems most true of the rational creature in its free action; but the hypothesis posited them as equals. Many Philosophers also teach in many places that every mover is either first simply, or is reduced to that first mover in moving, as is plain in the fourth and third of the first book and in the twentieth of this second. If, then, God and the rational creature are equals in order in their common motion, neither of them is simply the first mover, as is plain from the preceding argument. And since the first mover is unique, and it is not possible for there to be several, as the Philosopher teaches in Physics 8 and Metaphysics 12, and other Philosophers in many other places, this is also attested by the well-known saying of Topics 5, namely that what is said by way of superabundance will belong to one alone, as fire to be the lightest. Hence also the Prophet says, "You alone are the Most High over all the earth" (Psalm 72).[n2] Therefore God in a motion of this kind has a prior mover, and so on, as before.

NOTES

1. The cross-references are left as Savile has them: "the first, second, third and fourth of the first" (the noun is not expressed; the context suggests the corollaries of Book I, ch. 1), and the "[third]" corollary of I.2, with the bracket as printed. The bracketed tertij is Savile's insertion.
2. The words are Ps 82:19 [83:18] in the Vulgate, "Tu solus Altissimus in omni terra". Savile's text and the margin give "72", and I have kept his number.