Question 2:
The Existence of God
- General comments:
At first the very posing of this question might seem strange.
After all, if we are taking our starting points at least in part from
Christian revelation, then in that case the existence of God seems
certain a priori. It's
part of that revelation, after all. Why, then,
introduce arguments from natural reason for God's existence?
What is the point?
Actually, there seem to be several points,
some of which become evident as the question proceeds and others of
which lie in the background.
The first thing to notice is that St. Thomas is here using the
name
'God' as a common name in what we might call the "Gallup poll" sense of
'God'. When people are asked by pollsters whether or not they
believe in God, most say yes. But by 'God' they seem to mean
something fairly vague like 'some sort of ultimate principle of
the universe'. Some might in addition think of God as personal or
as in some way the source of the meaning of life, but just what this
God is remains shrouded in darkness. (A lot of us seem to
accept the existence of God but are fearful of a God who might, say,
interfere with the sort of comfortable life to which we've become
accustomed.) This is the broad sense in which
St. Thomas uses the term here. In fact, he argues that
the name 'God' is, though a common name, not a 'quidditative
name', i.e., a natural kind
term of the sort that allows us to "wrap our minds" around a species or
a genus in the way necessary to begin scientific inquiry. That
is, it's not a name like 'armadillo' or 'red oak tree', by which
we are able to give a rough and ready taxonomy of the material
substances we come into sensory contact with and so begin to study
them scientifically. To the
contrary, and in conscious opposition to St. Anselm, St.
Thomas seems to insist that the common name 'God' is a placeholder for
one or another 'description of supereminence', e.g., 'first
efficient
cause' or 'ultimate necessary being' or 'ultimate principle of the
universe' or 'source of being and goodness for all things' or
'intelligent orderer of all things'. Even though these
descriptions might implicitly contain more than meets the eye, they do
not on the surface give us anything like the God of classical theism.
For instance, notice that even
after
the proofs for the existence of 'God', St. Thomas takes it to be
necessary to
give additional and separate arguments in question 3 even for such
a weak conclusion as that God is not a body or material
substance. This shows that a philosophical proof for an uncaused
cause or a first efficient cause or a necessary being, etc., is not in
itself a proof of the existence of the sort of God revealed to Abraham
or Moses, to say nothing of the God of full-blown Christian
revelation. In fact, in ST 2-2,
q. 2, a. 2, ad 3, St. Thomas flat-out denies that non-believers
believe in God in the same sense that believers
do:
"Non-believers do not believe
in God under the same conception with which the act of faith is
posited. For they do not believe that God has those
determinations which faith lays down." [..... credere Deum non convenit infidelibus sub
ea ratione qua ponitur actus fidei. Non enim credunt Deum esse
sub his conditionibus quas fides determinat."]
The very best that non-believers can do
is to prove the existence of God under some such description as those
noted above. But this is to
think of God in a way that falls far short of the mysteries of the
Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, and the Church, wherein God is
seen in three persons:
Loving Father, Word Made Flesh, and Holy Spirit. St.
Thomas concludes, "And so non-believers do not truly believe in God,
since as the Philosopher says in Metaphysics
9, when it comes to
simple entities, the only possible defect in one's cognition
of them lies in not
grasping
them at all." [Et ideo nec vere
Deum credunt: quia ut Philosophus dicit, IX Metaphys., in
simplicibus defectus cognitionis est solum in non attingendo totaliter."]
But this having been said, the question seems even more
pressing: Why
bother with the proofs from natural reason, especially in light of
the fact that they fall short of what we start off with via
revelation?
One reason is that these arguments provide us
with a philosophically sophisticated articulation of that simple and
natural
understanding of God that is presupposed by divine revelation.
That is, God must communicate to us in a way that is adapted to our way
of thinking and understanding. And St. Thomas believes that our
experience of
the world triggers a natural wonder and desire for truth and goodness
that we in some sense turn into an understanding of God, even if this
understanding is woefully incomplete and, indeed, distorted in some
crucial ways. It is in this sense, for instance, that pagan
mythologies -- at least the ones that
haven't been completely corrupted -- serve as a preparation for
the
Gospel. (On this point, see
Chesterton's The Everlasting Man,
Part One, chaps. 4-8.) So we are open to God's self-revelation in
part because we sense that the world is mysterious and requires an
explanation and, what's more, because we naturally seek to make sense
of our lives within a broader cosmological framework.
Consistent with this, a second reason for the proofs is to provide
us
with certain names of God, derived from His effects, that allow us to
formulate a systematic separation of literal from
metaphorical attributions of predicates to God in Sacred
Scripture. This will become
clearer as we proceed through question 3 on God's simplicity.
It is important to see that (a) the nature of the Old
Testament, given its intended audience, makes the use of metaphor with
respect to God unavoidable (remember q. 1, a. 9) and that (b) it is
thus imperative that we have some sophisticated and principled way
of separating literal from metaphorical ascriptions of predicates
to God.
Finally, a third reason: It is part of the task of Sacra Doctrina
to divide the deliverances of faith into those that can and those that
cannot be established by natural reason. Therefore, the question
of whether God's existence can be established without recourse to
revelation is itself a properly theological question and one that has
played an important (though sometimes exaggerated) role within
mainstream Catholic thought.
- 2,1: Here St.
Thomas rejects a priori
proofs of God's existence such as Anselm's so-called 'ontological'
proof. He is
firmly convinced, rightly or wrongly, that our only natural access to
God comes through sensory experience of the world, where the world
and various significant aspects of it (e.g., change, end-oriented
operation, and contingency) are treated
as effects. (On St. Thomas's view, even our knowledge of
our own
minds and of our various cognitive and affective operations presupposes
sensory experience of the world 'outside' us.) Speaking at a very
general level, this is part of St. Thomas's Aristotelianism, which
grants a certain autonomy and importance to secondary (i.e., created)
causes and the study of them. (However, we will also see lots of
Platonism as we go along.)
St. Thomas makes a distinction between what is knowable per se in itself and what is
knowable per se to one or
another rational subject. Per
se knowability in itself is had by a proposition when the
definition of its subject includes the definition of its
predicate. However, I know such a proposition per se only if I grasp that the
definition of the subject includes the definition of the
predicate. In some simple cases we can assume that the two
coincide for every normal human being who has reached the 'age of
reason'. For instance, all such people know per se that a whole is greater than
a proper part of it, but only a few people know per se the per se knowable proposition that
incorporeal beings do not exist in a place. This is known per se only to those who are wise in the relevant respect.
It is worth reflecting a moment on the
person who thinks that an incorporeal substance must exist in a place.
We don't want to deny that he understands the concept incorporeal substance;
otherwise, he would not be able to entertain or assert the false
belief in
question. Perhaps we can say that he lacks an 'effective grasp'
of the concept incorporeal substance.
In the same way, before he hears Anselm's argument the fool lacks
an effective grasp of the concept that
than which a greater cannot be thought. (Later I will suggest
that St. Thomas denies that Anselm's
argument is sufficient to give one an effective grasp of this concept.)
So, says St. Thomas, if we effectively grasped the essence of God (or
the real
definition of God), we would know per
se that God exists. But in this life we are not wise in
this respect --
only God and the blessed in heaven are. (The blessed in heaven
have a "face-to-face" cognition of God. See q. 12.)
Our present access to God
is limited to knowing Him through His effects and not through His
essence; that is, we do not have the same sort of initial
cognitive grasp of God that we have of, say,
aardvarks and oak trees. Therefore, the proposition 'God exists'
is not known per se by
us. (Notice, by the
way, that the more detailed cognition we have in the theoretical
sciences of physical substances includes, once again, many propositions
that are per se knowable only
to
those who are 'wise' in those sciences. The
difference between this knowledge and our knowledge of God is that the
former is at least in principle such that we
(i.e., normal members of our species) can have it in this life.)
What about St.
Anselm's argument, then? Here things get a bit murky.
St. Thomas's first reply is that not everyone uses the term 'God' in
the way it is used in St. Anselm's argument, viz., to mean 'that than
which a greater cannot be thought' or 'most perfect possible
being'. This is true enough, but on the assumption that any
normal human being can grasp the meaning of 'that than which a greater
cannot be thought', we can simply bypass the term 'God' and
reformulate the argument using just the phrase 'that than which a
greater
cannot be thought'.
The second
objection is that even if one does mean this by the term 'God', he does
not thereby believe that such a being exists in reality "outside of the
intellect's apprehension." Once again, this is true enough,
but, to
put it in St. Thomas's own terms, Anselm's argument seems intended to
make the gainsayer 'wise' with respect to the proposition 'God (or:
that than which a greater cannot be thought) exists'. After
all, if the argument is successful, then the
'fool' who denies in his heart that there is a being
than which a greater cannot be thought is shown by the argument to
be
like the fool who denies that incorporeal beings do not exist in a
place. That is, one might claim that Anselm's argument is
intended precisely to give the fool an effective grasp of the relevant
concept and thus to convince him that he
cannot consistently maintain that there is no being than which a
greater cannot be thought. So -- on the surface at least -- St.
Thomas's objection seems to beg
the question against St. Anselm's argument. (Of course, someone
might claim that only a few people are capable of even so
much as understanding Anselm's argument. This might limit the
usefulness of the argument, but it is hard to see how it counts against
the argument itself. After all, Anselm's argument seems no
harder to
grasp than, say, the argument for the existence of a first efficient
cause that is found in Summa
Contra Gentiles
1, chap. 13.)
Can St. Thomas's objection be salvaged
here? I think perhaps it can be. But to see how, we
have to look at St. Thomas's own conception of natural theology.
(What follows is useful even if it does not really express St.
Thomas's criticism of Anselm's argument. I say this to indicate
the level of confidence I have in reading St. Thomas's critique in such
a way that it doesn't come out begging the question against Anselm.
Maybe he does just beg the question ..... .)
St. Thomas's natural theology is divided into three
phases: (1) the proof of the existence of an uncaused caused or
first
efficient cause, i.e.,
a being that acts and is a cause of other things but is not itself
caused
or acted upon; (2) the via remotionis, in
which the first cause is divided off from all other entities by denying
of it various intrinsic modes of being and composition characteristic
of finite and imperfect created entities; and (3) the via
affirmationis, in which positive
perfections are attributed to the first cause. (This triadic structure
is clearly evident, and indeed insisted upon, in Summa Contra
Gentiles 1, chaps. 10-102.)
Significantly, the thesis that the first cause (God in the
Gallup poll sense) is a perfect being is the conclusion of Phase 2
rather than either an initial
assumption or a deliverance of the Phase 1 argument. Phase
2 is taken up with the so-called
'negative attributes' -- to
wit, eternality, immutability, impassibility, simplicity, etc..
The predication of these attributes denies of the first
efficient cause various
limitations which we see to be true of material substances.
Hence, Phase 2 is meant to
establish the unlimitedness and perfection of the first
efficient cause and so does not take
that perfection for granted;
in short, Phase 2 occurs before the inception of any sort
of 'perfect being
theology', which asks what 'positive attributes' it is better for
a perfect being to have than not to have. So we have, first, a
proof of the existence of the first efficient cause and, second, the
derivation of the negative
attributes, culminating in the claim that the first efficient cause
('God') is a perfect being (i.e., a being greater than which none can
be thought).
In effect, then, the via remotionis constitutes
an inquiry into
the difference between Creator and creature. And within St. Thomas's
system
a being capable of creating ex nihilo is ultimately
characterized
in two basic and complementary ways,
one stemming from the Aristotelian tradition (Pure
Actuality) and the other stemming from the Platonic tradition (Unparticipated
Being). Within their respective traditions, these are limiting
notions
which strain our cognitive and imaginative resources but which for that
very reason provide us with a powerful characterization of the
ontological
abyss that divides the transcendent Creator of all things from the
entities He creates. In the Thomistic system, then, there is no doubt
about the
utter "otherness," incomprehensibility, and ineffability of the divine
nature.
At this point it becomes clear why St. Thomas thinks
that Anselm's way of proceeding has all the advantages of theft over
hard work. In natural theology, he claims, we do not begin with a
direct positive
(or 'quidditative') concept of God -- that is, a concept which would
allow
us to situate the divine nature within a taxonomy of genera and species
and thus to initiate a systematic inquiry into its positive
properties.
Instead, we are forced to reason discursively from certain evident
features
of the sensible world to the existence of a first efficient cause of
those
features, and then to argue from the descriptive concept first
efficient cause to the conclusion that the being whose existence
has been
proved
must be radically different intrinsically from the ordinary sensible
entities
that we do have direct positive concepts of. The upshot of this via
remotionis is that the first cause is "perfect in every way."
By contrast, St. Anselm, as St. Thomas sees it, treats God (i.e., most perfect possible being) as a
quidditative concept, or at least as a concept that we can thoroughly
grasp
without much effort. So grasping the concept perfect being, which is a
philosophical
achievement for St. Thomas, is a relatively simple matter for St.
Anselm. That is, whereas St. Thomas's
claim is that our only effective
grasp
of the Anselmian definition comes as a result of our having worked our
way
through the proof of a first efficient cause and then through the via remotionis, where we establish
the first efficient cause's lack of finitude and
imperfection, Anselm's alternative strategy is in effect to bypass
the via
remotionis and to formulate an argument
that yields up, right at the beginning, God as a perfect being and
hence gives us an effective grasp of the concept of
God-as-a-perfect-being.
So
on St. Thomas's view, we can effectively grasp the concept
of God-as-a-perfect-being
only as the result of hard philosophical work, and hence we cannot
assume that any non-philosopher will be able to effectively grasp this
concept simply as a result of having encountered Anselm's argument.
Notice, though, that one who does this work will have established
the existence of the being in question. This may be
what St. Thomas is getting at when he says:
"Still, even granted that
someone thinks that what is signified by the name
‘God’ is
what was just said -- viz., that than which a greater cannot be
thought -- it still does not thereby follow that he thinks that what
is signified by the name exists in reality rather than just in the
intellect’s apprehension. Nor
can one argue that it does exist in reality, unless it is granted that
there exists in reality something such that a greater cannot be thought.
But this is not granted by those who claim that God does not
exist." (my emphasis)
Besides, if we cannot immediately deduce the properties of those
physical objects whose essences we do have some limited cognitive
access to, then wouldn't it be astonishing if we were able to
have a better grasp of God's essence? (Interestingly, both
Blessed John Duns
Scotus and Leibniz
claimed that Anselm's argument works only if we have a separate proof
that the concept that than
which a greater cannot be thought (or most perfect possible being)
does not entail a
contradiction. So they seem to agree with St. Thomas at
least in the claim that Anselm's argument needs to be preceded by some
arduous philosophical toil.)
In any case, it is at least an open question whether everything that
St. Thomas says here and elsewhere about Anselm's argument can be put
together into a coherent and compelling objection to that
argument.
I must admit that I myself am still enamored with Anselm's
argument. But the above considerations at least go some way
toward helping me understand why St. Thomas isn't.
By the way, it is worth noting that St. Thomas does not mention St.
Anselm or the Proslogion
by name here. Why doesn't he? I believe that the correct
explanation is something along these lines: St. Thomas disagrees rather
sharply with Anselm on this particular point. But he is reluctant
to make a show of his disagreement with a respected authority whom
he most often agrees with or, at least, disagrees with to a lesser
degree than in the present case. So out of respect for Anselm he
declines to name him. This isn't a useless game. Rather, it
flows from a communal conception of philosophical inquiry and the
demand that one show respect for those with whom one disagrees,
especially if they themselves occupy a high rung in the hierarchy of
authorities. Anselm is not, of course, a Father of the Church,
but neither is he just another theologian. So there is nothing
virtuous to be gained by singling out Anselm by name and thereby
exalting oneself. (Notice that later on (q. 3, a.8) St.
Thomas does not shy away from calling David of Dinant stupid
for claiming that God is the matter of the universe. Since
everyone agrees that this was a pretty stupid claim, this breach of
decorum is not an instance of self-exaltation.)
- 2,2: Even
though we cannot know a priori
that God exists, we can still prove the existence of God a posteriori under certain
descriptions.
Now the ideal scientific explanation is a demonstration propter quid,
where
we go from a theoretical understanding of essences as causes to
various effects. However, even in natural science we have no
choice but to
begin with the effects and then to reason our way back to their
causes. Only
in this way, often aided by the construction of a theory, are we in a
position to see the effects as emanating from their now understood
causes. (Think of explanations in particle physics or in
chemistry, for instance.)
This second sort of reasoning is what St. Thomas, following Aristotle,
calls a demonstration quia,
which works from effects back to their causes. This, according to
St. Thomas, is the only sort
of argument that we can muster for God's existence. More
specifically,
we use certain general features of the natural world as starting
points for arguments that reason back to God, under an appropriate
description, as their ultimate cause or explanation. As already
noted, however, this does
not in itself give us
knowledge of God's essence or attributes, except with respect to
whatever it would
take to explain the effect in question. For instance, the first
way
of art. 3 reasons back to God, under the description 'first mover', as
the ultimate cause of motion or
change, while the second way reasons back to God as the 'first
efficient cause' ultimately responsible for all other exercises of
efficient causality.
- 2,3: I will
not try to give a complete assessment of the arguments here, though it
is important to notice that in art. 3 none of the arguments is
given in its
full-blown version.
This should alert us right away to the fact that the arguments are
playing a different role here from their role in natural theology.
For instance, the first way appears here in a severely
truncated version when one compares it to the corresponding
argument in Summa Contra
Gentiles 1, q. 13.
This, I believe, confirms the view that the arguments function here
mainly to link our intuitive notions of an ultimate being to
somewhat more sophisticated descriptions that will
help us distinguish God from creatures in a philosophically robust
way. In the Summa Contra
Gentiles, by contrast, St. Thomas's main purpose is to give a
complete version of the argument in hopes of attaining the assent of
the
Gentile philosophers to the conclusion of the argument.
Notice that
each of the arguments gives us a description of God that coheres
with some of the
ideas people normally harbor about God: an ultimate cause that
is not itself caused, a necessary being responsible for the
existence
of
everything else, governor of the universe, the best and most noble
being, etc. St. Thomas thinks that these are ordinary and natural
conceptions
of God and that, furthermore, there are good arguments supporting
the existence of a being or beings who satisfy those conceptions.
All mythologies reflect at least some of
these arguments in one way or another. Admittedly, these
descriptions are not
much to go on, but one of St. Thomas's main metaphysical
accomplishments is to show that they are indeed sufficient to
ground a philosophically sophisticated articulation of God's
transcendence. This is the burden of questions 3 and 4
especially, as well as of questions 5-11 -- not to mention the via
remotionis as it is found in St. Thomas's natural theology in Summa
Contra Gentiles 1, chaps. 14-29.
Notes on the first and
second ways: Notice that in these two ways, the relevant
causes are ordered essentially
rather than temporally.
That is, these are not arguments for a temporal
beginning of the world; in fact, St. Thomas in other places makes it
clear that on his view it cannot be proved through natural reason alone
that the world had
a beginning in time. Rather,
these arguments are
meant
to show that any instance of motion or change or efficient causality
demands a simultaneously
acting
hierarchy of causes, and that this hierarchy must have an upper limit
(an unmoved mover or first efficient cause) if any change is taking
place or being
effected at all. The argument, in brief, is that (a) every change
requires as an
ultimate cause a being that effects change in other things but is
not itself changed, and that (b) the operation of any cause within the
universe
requires the simultaneous existence and operation of a transcendent
first efficient cause, which acts but is not acted upon. The key
premise in both cases is the one that says in effect that the effect we
see is inexplicable unless the ordered series of causes has a first
member. The idea is that there is in the end no complete
explanation for any perceptible effect (or exercise of efficient
causality) unless the explanation invokes a finite series of movers (or
efficient causes). Is this plausible? I believe that it is,
despite the fact that the other side might be able to make a plausible
case as well. One indication of this is that in the sciences we
keep pushing back the limits of explanation almost by nature, looking
for an ultimate stopping point. Particle physics is an
interesting case in point. This is a matter that is at least
worth pondering. I will leave it at that for now.
One related (and disputed) question is whether or not these arguments
depend on
outdated Aristotelian physics. Another way of putting the dispute
is this: Are these arguments physical
arguments that depend on Aristotle's conception of the physical
universe and its changes, or are they instead metaphysical arguments
that are sound (and are meant to be sound) no matter what
particular
physical theory is
correct? I tend to think of them -- especially the second way --
in
the latter manner. This is especially true when we note that the
arguments assume that the complete
explanation for any change in the
universe will take us beyond physical, chemical, and biological
theories to ultimate questions such as: Why are these the true
theories in their relevant domains?
(I am not suggesting that each explanation within a given science must
include a reference to a first cause or an uncaused cause, etc.
Rather, what I am suggesting is that any such explanation raises
further questions -- some belonging to the natural sciences and some to
metaphysics or philosophy of nature -- which our minds naturally aspire
to answer. Take, for instance, the question: Given that
such-and-such an explanation follows from the laws of nature, why
should it be that our universe (or our part of the universe) follows
these laws rather than other conceivable ones? You don't have to
be a theist to ask questions like this. Hume did a pretty good
job of it, even if he concluded that our minds are incapable of
answering such questions and, because of this, we would be better off
not asking them or at least not expecting unrevealed answers to
them. Modern-day micro-physics is an especially apt science for
raising such ultimate questions. I recommend physicist Lisa
Randall's book Warped Passages
as a fertile source for generating many such questions.)
A note on
the 'quantifier fallacy' of the third way: In the
third way
St.
Thomas seems to reason as follows: If each entity is such that at
some time it does not exist, then there is a time at which nothing
exists. Sharp commentators point out that this inference is
formally invalid. After all, it seems that one could have an
everlasting
succession of things that satisfied the antecedent, in which case the
consequent would be false. Now despite the acuity of the
commentators, this is a pretty obvious counterexample to one way of
portraying the logical
form of the inference -- which right
away should give us pause. While St. Thomas is
not infallible, he is pretty damned (well, blessedly) smart and not
likely to commit the simple error of mistaking a formally
invalid argument form for a formally valid one. One might even
begin to suspect that his argument depends crucially
on the content of the
antecedent and not on the validity of one natural formal
representation of the inference.
(Consider: Any sound argument can be
represented as a formally invalid inference. Here's one: God exists; therefore, I should be careful
about how I treat other people. That looks pretty good to
me. But let p = God exists and q = I should be careful about how I treat
other people, and then the inference will be represented as p; therefore, q --
not exactly your
paradigmatic formally valid inference.)
So let's look at the third way a bit more closely. First of
all,
the argument focuses at the beginning just
on things that are subject
to generation and corruption, and not all things that are possibly
such
that they exist and possibly such that they do not exist. For
instance, angels as St. Thomas conceives of them need not have existed,
but they are nonetheless not subject to generation and
corruption and hence are not in the relevant sense such that they have
the potential to exist and the potential not to exist. That is,
they do not contain within themselves
principles of generation or corruption. This is why they are not
subject to death. So as far as the present argument is concerned,
they
would, so conceived, count as necessary
beings. (See the second half of the argument,
which allows for the possibility that some 'necessary' beings are
dependent
on others.) The same holds for the celestial bodies
as Aristotle conceives of them (their matter being subject only to
local motion and to no other form of change, including
generation and corruption). Interestingly, the
same holds for primary matter, which is a principle of generation
and corruption for sublunar material substances but is not itself
subject to generation or corruption according to Aristotle. (How
could it be? What would it come from? What would it be
corrupted into?)
Now with this background in mind, take another look at St. Thomas's
argument. What he is arguing is that it is impossible for every being
to be contingent in
the sense of being subject to
generation and corruption. Presumably, this would include the
matter out of which material substances are composed. Now assume
with the argument that every individual that is subject to generation
and
corruption
is such that at some time it does not exist. (The commentators
are usually willing to concede this premise.) And
suppose that the matter out of which material substances are
composed is itself subject to corruption. Then at some time the
matter out of which material
substances are composed did not exist. Since all
material substances have this matter as a component, there would be no
material substances after that time. Furthermore, spiritual
beings (and celestial bodies) either (a) would have their own
brand of
matter subject to corruption, in which case the same
argument would hold for their matter and hence for themselves,
or (b) would not be subject to generation or corruption and hence
would not exist given the assumption that every being that actually
exists is subject to generation and corruption. Hmmm ..... it
looks like maybe St. Thomas's argument is a bit stronger than it seemed
at first. In particular, while it might not in general be valid
to argue that if everything is such that at some time it does not
exist, then there is a time at which nothing exists, it might indeed be
valid to argue that if everything that has ever existed -- and
I
do mean everything, including
primary matter --
were subject to generation and corruption, then nothing would
exist
now. So there must be at least one necessary being, i.e., being
not subject to generation and corruption. At this
point, the second half of the argument comes into play,
showing that the fact that a being is not subject to generation
and corruption
is not sufficient to explain its existence. Some necessary beings
may indeed have their esse and
necessity from another. But this regress cannot go on to
infinity. So there is a necessary being whose esse and necessity do not derive
from another. "And this everyone calls God." Note, though,
that at this point, in the absence of further arguments, it could be
that primary
matter is itself the ultimate necessary being.
I do not claim to have shown that the argument is a good one.
After all, is it fair to count all of primary matter as a single
being, as it were? Perhaps. Perhaps not. (Actually,
the argument would work if it were always the case that a
substance's share of primary matter ceased to exist upon the
corruption of
that substance. In that case all generation would eventually
cease and corruption would continue along until everything was
corrupted.)
All I am
saying is that this argument is a lot more interesting than some
contemporary commentators have claimed.
A note on the fourth way:
Even though St. Thomas invokes Aristotle in this argument, the argument
has a neo-Platonistic aura about it. Also, notice that the
argument as
presented does not attempt to show that the maximal being is also
maximally good and maximally true. It simply assumes this
identity in what "we call God." Once again, this is an indication
that the arguments are meant to tie our natural tendency to believe in
a God with specific descriptions that will then be appealed to in the
articulation of the difference between God and other beings.
A note on the fifth way:
St. Thomas argues that the fact of end-oriented action in
nature entails an
intelligent orderer. In this he seems to agree with all those
atheists who are eager to banish every vestige of real-world teleology
from the natural sciences for fear of having to admit the existence of
God. (I say 'real-world' because some might
claim that even though, because of our epistemic limitations, we have
no choice but to use teleological explanations, we should not
conclude that there is
any
real teleology out there beyond our explanations.) Is this a good
argument? I don't know. I would have thought that an
Aristotelian could just claim that the principles that give rise to
teleological explanations are basic intrinsic facts about
substances and that they don't require further explanation. But
what do I know? St. Thomas believes that such principles
ineluctably point back to an intelligent being. (I have a bit more to say about this matter near the end of this paper.)
Question 3:
God's Simplicity
- General comments:
Here we see St. Thomas at his best. We do not have a direct
positive grasp of God's essence which we could use as a starting point
for inquiry, as we do with ordinary physical substances. Further,
we cannot in principle attain such a grasp in this life just on the
basis of our familiarity with God's effects, in the way that we reason
to the existence of theoretical physical entities and components in
order to explain various effects that occur in the natural world.
This is the upshot of St. Thomas's claim that we do not and cannot
(in
this life) know God as He is in Himself. You might think he's
just kidding, because you have a 340-page book in front of you with
everything St. Thomas has to say about God in Himself. But as we
go on, I think it will become clear that he is not kidding and that our
language about God is so far removed from our ordinary language
about natural
substances, from
which our language about God takes its origin, that we barely know
what we are
talking about when we talk about God. This is good, St. Thomas
thinks, since it prevents us from being too comfortable, as it were,
with our intellectual and affective grasp of God. It also
highlights God's goodness to us in making known to us things that we
could not have known without His self-revelation and yet that are
crucial for our ability to flourish in accord with our nature.
(From St. Thomas's perspective, God is not at all pleased with the
rampant relativism and agnosticism concerning His nature and actions
that tends to be popular in contemporary liberal democracies -- you
know what I mean: "No one is in a better position than anyone
else to know what God is like or expects from us." From St.
Thomas's perspective, God has been beating down the door trying to get
through to us at least since the time of Abraham. But, then, the
God of the Old and New Testaments tends to keep us from doing what we
want to do in our post-lapsarian condition. So it is more
convenient for us to profess utter ignorance about what God might
expect from us.)
Because of our limitations, the best we can hope for at the beginning
is to show that God utterly transcends the things with which we are
familiar and which serve as the natural objects of our knowledge, viz.,
material substances. St. Thomas does this negatively, by trying
to show that God lacks all the limitations found in His effects.
Given the classical metaphysical framework he is operating within, he
has a very precise and effective way of doing this, since scholastic
metaphysics posits several types of composition which exist
in one way or another "in" created things.
These include (a) composition of integral material parts, (b)
composition of form and matter, (c) composition of suppositum (or
subject) and nature (or essence or quiddity), (d) composition of esse and essence (or nature), (e)
composition of genus and difference, (f) composition of substance and
accident. Question 3 goes through this list and, along with
questions 4-11, concludes that
since God is not composed in any of the relevant ways, he
is wholly
unlimited and thus perfect. This is the upshot of the so-called via negativa or via remotionis. Anything else
we say about God will be under the cloud of God's utter transcendence
as shown by this via remotionis.
Hence, at the conclusion of the via
remotionis we have concerns about how we can possibly know God
and talk about him, given how utterly different He is from anything we
have direct knowledge of; these concerns are addressed in
questions 12 and 13. Only then do we go on to say
something
about God's intellectual and volitional operations, where this is based
both on reason and revelation. So question 3 plays an absolutely
crucial role here. (In this connection, you might want to take a
look at my
short piece on the so-called 'open theory of God'.)
- 3,1:
The
first thing to notice here is that St. Thomas does not think it is
self-evident that God (i.e., unmoved mover or first efficient
cause or first being) is not a body and thus is not composed of
material parts. This requires an argument. (After all, lots
of people have identified God with various material entities, both
natural and man-made.) Furthermore, all the objections in this
question invoke Scriptural attributions of bodily parts, shape,
posture, etc., to God. St. Thomas needs to show that these
attributions are metaphorical. There are several things at work
here. One is the philosophical articulation of God's
transcendence that helps us to make the distinction between
metaphorical and literal attributions. But it is important to
remember that St. Thomas is not working in a vacuum here. The
Scriptures themselves make attributions of God that are seemingly in
tension with one another, and long before St. Thomas came on the scene
there were commentary traditions in both Judaism and Christianity that
had
already dealt with this problem; what's more, the Church had
already spoken
definitively about many of the divine attributes. So St. Thomas
does not intend to throw all that out and come up with his own new
interpretation of Scripture. What he intends to do is to provide
a philosophically systematic and coherent account of God's
transcendence that yields results consonant with the teaching of the
Church and with the preponderance of the Rabbinic and Patristic
interpretations of
passages on which Church teaching allows some degree of interpretative
leeway.
Note that the three arguments all
tease out the implications of names of God established in question
2, viz., 'unmoved mover' (not subject to being moved), 'first
being' (no admixture of passive potentiality), 'most noble
being'. The replies to the objections all explicate the literal
meaning that underlies the metaphorical attributions of materiality to
God.
One interesting sidelight here is ad
2, where St. Thomas explains that
it is because of man's reason and intellect -- and not because of his
body -- that we are said to be made
in God's image. Without denying the centrality of reason and
intellect, Pope John Paul II, in his
'theology of the body', has argued that the complementary physical
differences
between men and women are also wrought in God's image in the sense in
which this notion is invoked in Genesis. Intriguing, eh?
- 3,2: We next
move on to composition of form and matter, had by all material
substances on an Aristotelian conception of them. Here
two of the objections come from Scripture, one with an attribution of a
soul to God and the other with the attributions of passions, e.g.,
anger, which on an Aristotelian view essentially involve a bodily
change. The last objection is a metaphysical one, viz., that God
is an individual and that the principle of individuation is
matter.
St. Thomas's first argument is once again are
traceable to the descriptions of God as 'Pure Actuality'.
Given that
God is pure actuality, He has no passive potency; but anything composed
of form and matter can be acted upon and hence has passive
potency. The third argument is that
form is the principle of acting in an agent and that since God is a
first agent (an agent who is not acted upon), He must be pure form
without matter.
The argument I want to focus on, however, is the second one, since it
introduces a Platonic distinction that will feature prominently in St.
Thomas's account of God. This is the distinction between being such-and-such through one's essence
and being such-and-such by
participation. In this instance, the distinction is
deployed to distinguish God, who is good
through His essence, from material substances, which are good by participation precisely
because their matter participates in form. The conclusion is
that God
must be form without matter.
Let's look at the distinction a bit more closely. To be
such-and-such through one's essence implies not only that one is
such-and-such by nature but also that one has, so to speak, the
fullness of the relevant characteristic. This becomes clear when
St.
Thomas applies the distinction to being
itself. There is a sense in which everything is essentially a
being -- for it cannot exist without being a being. However, only
God is Subsistent Esse through His
essence, since only God is an ultimately necessary being and
only God possesses the fullness of being.
A last word about ad 3.
Matter is a principle of individuation,
according to St. Thomas, only in the case of forms that "can be
received in matter." However, God and other spiritual substances
are such that they are subsistent forms incapable of being received in
matter. Therefore, they are individuals in themselves.
- 3,3: In this
article we find another distinction that can be used to separate God
(and other spiritual substances) off from substances composed of form
and matter, viz., the distinction between the nature of a thing and the subject or suppositum which has that
nature. For instance, we can say 'Socrates has humanity' or
'Socrates has a human nature' as a philosophically sophisticated
version of 'Socrates is a man'. And we can say that Socrates's
humanity exists 'in' him. So here is another form of
composition. (Note that from this point on, the objections are
taken no longer from Scripture but from various philosophical
standpoints. In each case, St. Thomas tries to show either that
the philosophical objection is wrongheaded to begin with or that it
needs to be modified in order to extend the philosophical theories in
question to the case of God.)
On the surface, it seems that we can attribute this form of composition
to God. For just as we say 'Humanity exists in Socrates', so too
we can say 'Divinity exists in God'. Moreover, given that God is
a cause of other things and that causes effect what is similar to
themselves, it seems that God, like we ourselves, is such that in Him
there is a composition of suppositum and nature (or essence).
St. Thomas replies by explaining another difference between material
substances and spiritual substances, which are subsistent forms.
In the former, the nature includes just that which is common to all the
members of the species and is captured by the real definition of the
species. But in addition, each individual of the species has its
own set of material accidental determinations that fall outside the
definition of the species. These material accidental
determinations are lacking in the case of spiritual substances, and so
in such substances there is no composition of suppositum and
nature. The subsistent substance just is its own nature.
(Lurking in the background is St. Thomas's (disputed) claim that each
angel constitutes his own species.) A fortiori, this holds in the case
of God as well. So God is not distinct from His divinity or from
the other essential determinations, e.g., life, that count as part of
the nature in the case of material things. (A different story has
to be told about those determinations that are accidents in our case,
e.g., wisdom and power.)
We should pay special attention to ad
1. Here St. Thomas
enunciates a constant theme of his teaching on God: "We ourselves
are unable to talk about simple entities except in the way we talk
about the composite entities from which we take our cognition.
And so, when speaking of God, we use concrete names (e.g., 'living',
'wise') to signify His
subsistence (since by our lights it is only composites that subsist),
and we use abstract names (e.g., 'life', 'wisdom') to signify His
simplicity. So the fact
that divinity, life, and other things of this sort are said to be 'in'
God should be traced back to a duality (diversitas) that occurs in
our
intellect’s grasp of the thing and not to any duality within the
thing
itself." This defectiveness of language is something we
cannot correct except by pairing ordinary ways of speaking ('God is
living') with ways of speaking that from our ordinary perspective are
deviant ('God is His life').
- 3,4: We next
come to a form of composition which is characteristic of all created
substances, including created spiritual substances, and that
distinguishes every creature from God. This is composition of esse and essence
(or nature). Here what counts as the 'essence' is the whole
substance or suppositum with all its essential determinations.
This
type of composition is lacked only by a being that (a) does not depend
on
another for its esse or
existence and that (b) is not such that there need not have been any
such thing as it. Both of the objections take esse in a minimalist sense as what
is common to everything and expressed by the English term 'exists',
i.e., that in virtue of which a thing is something rather than
nothing. (This is the second and 'propositional sense' of esse pointed out in ad 1.)
This is pretty paltry for the divine essence, which presumably includes
all perfections, and so the conclusion in both cases is that God's
essence must be something more than His esse.
But as St. Thomas uses it here, esse
in any given case is such-esse.
For instance, horse-esse
differs from pig-esse.
This is the upshot of the second argument. A thing's esse is just
the actuality of its essential perfections. In God this esse is not received, since there
is no potentiality to be actualized. Instead, there is just pure
actuality.
This goes along with the first argument: Anything that has
composition of esse and
essence must be such that its esse
is caused by another; but this is
incompatible with God's status as the First Efficient Cause.
The third argument is of the Platonistic type introduced above.
God is not a being by participation that has some proper subset of the
set of all perfections. (Note that even though angels are not
subject to generation and corruption, they are nonetheless beings
by
participation and receive their esse
from another.) Rather, He is a being through
His essence, since He is the first being. This entails, as
becomes clear in ad 2, that
His esse
is unlimited (i.e., unparticipated) and hence not knowable by us in
this life.
As we go on, it should be getting clearer and clearer that God is
utterly transcendent. We certainly can't imagine what it is to
be God,
and we can't really conceive it, either. All we can say is:
well,
He's not like trees, bugs, human beings, angels, etc. We need to
say
strange things even in order to express what little we know of Him.
- 3,5: The next
sort of composition is the composition of genus and
difference. Even though this is, according to St. Thomas (if not
Duns Scotus), a logical
rather
than physical composition, it
nonetheless
reflects the physical components (form/matter) of the substance in
question. And in every case in which the genus/difference
distinction applies the potentiality/actuality distinction applies as
well. From this it follows straightforwardly that there is no
such composition in God.
In denying that God is in a genus, either as a species or by reduction,
St. Thomas is in effect denying that there any limitations to God's
perfection. For every genus is limited in a way that is
incompatible
with God's role as the principle of all esse.
Indeed, we might think of a genus or species as the partitioning
of the set of all perfections in a way appropriate to the genus or
species in question. For instance, dog-esse, which is definitive of the
nature of dogs, specifies a determinate proper subset of the set of all
perfections.
Note that in ad 1 St. Thomas
denies that God can be thought of as being contained in the
category (i.e.,
most general genus) of substance. Later in the course we will see
instances where it is nonetheless permissible to use the language of
substance when talking about God.
- 3,6: The
next, and last, sort of composition is the composition of substance and
accident. In each case the accident actualizes some passive
potentiality on the part of the substance. Hence, it follows
straightforwardly that God has no accidents. Any perfections that
God has He has by essence and not by virtue of any reality that brings
to perfection was is present only potentially in the divine
substance. Of course, our language is not adapted to such a
being, since we think of accidents as realities in their own right (or,
at least, we should so think of them in general). And so we have
to say weird things about God -- e.g., that God is not only wise
but Wisdom
itself -- in order to indicate that God's wisdom, unlike ours, is not
an
accident and, in this case at least, not an accident that can come and
go. More on this below when we get to question 13.
- 3,7: St.
Thomas's first argument simply summarizes the first six articles.
In effect, it says that (a) a simple being has no composition, that (b)
these are
the six types of composition that things can have, that (c) God has
none of
them, and that therefore (d) God is absolutely simple. As an
absolutely simple
being, He is wholly other than every other being. When we add in
a. 8 that, unlike points, lines, surfaces and primary matter, God is a
simple being who does not enter into the composition of anything else,
we see that God is utterly unlike any object of our actual or possible
(in this life) experience. An aura of mystery surrounds
Him. "Who is like unto Him?"
The remaining arguments all invoke the descriptions of God established
in question 2. A first being cannot be posterior to its
components; a first efficient cause cannot itself have a cause; a being
that is pure actuality cannot have any potentiality.
- 3,8: If God
is in some sense the esse of
all things, then it might seem that He
must enter into composition with other things. Furthermore, there
seems to be no easy way to distinguish God from primary matter, which
enters into the composition of all material substances. For both
of them are simple in themselves.
Notice that once again St. Thomas finds it necessary to argue for a
conclusion that those of us brought up in the tradition of
Judaeo-Christian revelation might find obvious. This is because
he really is starting from ordinary people's vague conceptions of
God. In fact, in this article he tries to refute two separate
types of pantheism, one of which identifies God with the World-Soul and
the other of which "stupidly" identifies Him with matter.
He first points out that a (transeunt)
efficient cause effects something distinct from itself. So given
that God is the first efficient cause of the world, it follows that
He is distinct from the world. What's more, any matter or
form
that enters into composition with another cannot itself be an agent,
even it might be a principle of acting; rather, it is the
composite that it is "primarily and per
se" an agent. But God is primarily and per se an agent.
Notice how in ad 2 St. Thomas
accommodates the citation to St.
Augustine in obj. 2. What he does -- and this is his standard
procedure -- is to find a sense in which what Augustine says is true
but does not damage the position St. Thomas wishes to defend. In
this case, for instance, he points out that the Word of God, i.e., the
Son of God eternally begotten by the Father, is a form in the sense of
being an exemplar of all created things. This will become clearer
below, given St. Thomas's claim that all created things in some way
imitate God's being and nature. But the main point I am making
here is about his treatment of Augustine. Some claim that the Summa
Theologiae is replete with positions that would be rejected by
Augustine and that, in general, St. Thomas replaces the Platonizing
tendencies of Augustine with a type of Aristotelianism. There may
be some truth to this claim, but it is often made by people who fail to
appreciate just how much Platonism there is in St. Thomas's
system. The idea that there is a fundamental opposition between
St. Thomas and St. Augustine is, I believe, highly exaggerated, though
it cannot be denied that while Augustine develops a more 'interior'
approach to God in many of his writings, St. Thomas's way is to proceed
by way of our experience of the natural world. In general, St.
Thomas is more impressed by the world of nature and the natural
sciences. Still, one should be suspicious of the idea that there
is a fundamental opposition -- as opposed to a sort of complementarity
-- between Augustine and Aquinas. (It's worth asking just who it
is who would have something to gain by exaggerating the differences
between Augustine and Aquinas ..... hmm, maybe Luther or Calvin, say?
Those of us who celebrate big feast days on both January 28 and
August 28 should not be taken in by this. Enough said.)
Question 4: God's Perfection
- General Comments:
From the discussion of simplicity, St. Thomas goes on to a discussion
of perfection and goodness. God's absolute simplicity is a
necessary and sufficient condition for God's perfection, since the
various types of composition represent all the sources of finitude and
imperfection. So this question is a natural sequel to the
question on divine simplicity. What's more, St. Thomas takes this
occasion to make
a first stab at the question of how God's perfections are related to
the perfections of creatures.
- 4,1: Those
ancients who limited themselves to thinking just of the first material
principle, viz., matter, did not think it to be perfect. But St.
Thomas points out that it has already been established that God is a
first efficient principle
and not a first material principle.
And such a principle must be perfect, since perfection varies according
to degree of actuality, and God is maximally actual.
In ad 3 St. Thomas makes
this clearer by pointing out that esse
is the principle of
actuality. We must not think of a created substance as somehow
constituted prior to receiving esse.
Rather, everything that it is (including all its parts and components)
is conferred with God's conferral of esse.
This must be true if everything is created by God ex nihilo, i.e., depends
immediately on God for its existence and the existence of all its parts
and components. In the case of creation, we can think of a
created thing as having a part of -- or participating in -- esse-as-such, the plenitude of all
being and perfection. God, by contrast, just is unpartitioned esse and hence has all perfection.
- 4,2-3: St.
Thomas wants to claim that all the perfections of things exist in
God. But the objections to this claim seem insurmountable.
First of all, some of the perfections of creatures (e.g., differences
which constitute the species within a given species) are opposed to one
another. What's more, some of the perfections of things (e.g.,
their quantitative accidents) are incompatible with God's simplicity
and His immateriality. So how to respond?
St. Thomas first argues from the general thesis that effects must in
some way or other be similar to their causes. Why hold
this? Well, it is obvious in the case of univocal causes, which share the
same nature with their effects. But what of equivocal causes,
i.e., causes that are in some sense superior to their effects and that
differ from their effects in species?
Here, St. Thomas says, the effects preexist virtually in their causes
in a more eminent way.
Is this any more than simply forcing the
principle to be true? Take, for instance, the case of
intelligent agents. I call your paper 'intelligent' because you
used your intelligence well in writing it and because it is a sign of
your intelligence. So your paper is
similar to you in some relevant respect, even though you are an equivocal or non-univocal cause of it. In
the same way, St. Thomas insists, even non-intelligent equivocal agents
must, by virtue of producing an effect, have had that effect in their
power as that which they were ordered to. (Qualifications are
necessary here, since agents sometimes fail to bring about all the
perfection they are ordered to.) And, as we have already seen,
St. Thomas traces the operation of non-intelligent causes to the
operation of God as the intelligent orderer of natural operations.
Now
every created thing stands to God in a way similar to that in which
your paper stands to
you.
So by virtue of being capable of producing every possible created
perfection, God possesses such perfections "in a more eminent mode"
than He would if He were just their subject and not their
efficient
cause. Conversely, creatures are similar to God in roughly
the way that an image of a man is similar to that man -- though even
here the best we can say is that "a creature is said to be similar
to God not because they share in a form according to the same nature of
genus or species, but only because of an analogy, viz., insofar as God
is a being through His essence and the others are beings through
participation" (art. 3, ad 3).
However, there is another thing at stake here, and it has to do with a
danger posed by the strong theory of divine transcendence that St.
Thomas articulates. The danger is that God will be so remote from
us that all divine names become equally appropriate or
inappropriate. This deteriorates into a type of agnosticism that
threatens any order in the divine names. For instance, if all we
meant by 'God is good' is that God is a cause of good, then we would be
completely in the dark about what God is like in Himself -- even to the
point of wondering whether our use of the term 'good' in ordinary
circumstances has anything at all to do with God's goodness. In
question 6 St. Thomas will argue that God is good in Himself through
His essence and hence the standard of all good things. So here,
when he argues that God has every perfection, he is in part aiming to
show that there is a similarity between created perfections, including
created goodness in general, and God's perfection. This will
become clearer as we go on, and especially in question 13 on the divine
names. However, it is worth noting at once that it is
precisely the Platonic language of participation that gives us a handle
on God's intrinsic perfection. God is not just the efficient cause of all being and
all goodness but he exists and is good through His essence, whereas we
exist and are good by participation.
Question 5: The Good in General
- General Comments:
It might seem strange for St. Thomas to discuss goodness here,
since
goodness seems to be the sort of 'positive' attribute one would expect
to find in the via affirmationis
rather than here in the midst of the via
remotionis.
However, the connection was made in the introductions to question
3
and question 4 (which, unfortunately, you will not find on the New
Advent website --
bad move, not printing the introductions, since they are crucial to
understanding the structure of the Summa).
In those
introductions St. Thomas says
tersely:
"So, first of all, we will inquire into His simplicity, by which
composition is excluded from Him (question 3). And because among
corporeal things the simple ones are imperfect and mere parts, we will
inquire, second, into His perfection (questions 4-6) .....".
(Introduction to question 3)
"Now that we have examined God’s simplicity, we must consider the
perfection of God Himself. And since each thing is called good to
the extent that it is perfect, we must first talk about God’s
perfection and then about His goodness ....." (Introduction to
question 4)
So the explanation is fairly straightforward: First, he must show
the connection between God's simplicity and His perfection; second, the
discussion of perfection essentially involves the notion of goodness.
Curiously, though, in the Summa
Contra Gentiles goodness is the first divine attribute discussed
in the via affirmationis.
Perhaps it's important to remember that the Summa Contra Gentiles has natural
theology as its central task, and so a strict order is mandatory,
whereas the project of the Summa
Theologiae gives St. Thomas a bit more freedom about how to
order his discussion of God's nature. He keeps the same basic
structure, since he still needs to make relevant points about God's
transcendence and perfection in order to come to a deeper understanding
of Sacred Scripture. But in this instance, the discussion of
divine perfection, which could have been taken as simply the
culmination of the via remotionis -- i.e., divine perfection = complete
absence of creature-like limitations and imperfections -- is instead
used to introduce the positive notion of goodness in order to amplify
the connotations of perfection.
- 5, 1-3: The
first three articles concern the relation between being and good:
The first article argues that being and good are "the same in reality"
but "different in concept." This means, first, that every being
is good and whatever is good is a being. You can't have the one
without the other. (From this it follows immediately that nothing
is
wholly evil, i.e., unqualifiedly evil or evil in every respect.)
The conceptual
difference is that good adds
to being the notion of
desirability. In ad 1,
St. Thomas teases out this difference by pointing out that something
has being absolutely speaking simply by virtue of being something
rather than nothing or by virtue of being actual rather than merely
potential, whereas something is good absolutely speaking only by virtue
of being perfect in its kind. In technical language, something
has being in an unqualified way in virtue of its first act or first
(i.e., substantival) esse,
whereas it is good in an unqualified way
only in virtue of its last or ultimate act (i.e., its perfection).
Notice that there is a qualified sense in which a substance with
goodness in an unqualified sense has more being or actuality than one
which lacks goodness in an unqualified sense. It is in this sense
that we can characterize God as the "fullness of being."
The second article is in a way an answer to the Platonistic (actually,
Plotinistic) claim that goodness is prior to being. (Remember
Plotinus's characterization of God.) First of all, St. Thomas
makes the plausible claim that the being or nature of a thing is the
first thing that our minds grasp with respect to it, and it is this
being or nature that "is signified by the spoken term."
(Admittedly, good is
prior in the order of causality, since the end is the "cause of
causes," i.e., that in virtue of which the other causes either act
(efficient cause) or are acted upon (material cause) or are effected
(formal cause) -- but that is a different matter.) Something that
is absolute non-being cannot be good, even though what is a being in
potentiality can be desired and hence can be good "not by predication
but by causality." (I want a table, and this desire leads me to
do what will lead to my having a table, even if the table does not yet
exist in actuality.)
Finally, non-being can sometimes be a good, but only incidentally (per accidens). That is,
non-being is not intended in itself and for its own sake, but only for
the sake of gaining some good or removing some evil.
The third article argues that every being is good. Objections 3
and 4 are the interesting ones here. Primary matter is being in
potentiality and hence good only in potentiality, but it is good at
least in this sense. Mathematical entities, according to St.
Thomas, do not exist in their own right but instead are separate from
other things only conceptually, i.e., "insofar as they are abstracted
from motion and matter and thus abstracted from the notion of an end."
- 5,4: Turning
from the relation between being and good, St. Thomas next
addresses the question of the causal role of good. The objections argue
that good has the character of a formal
cause (because of its connection with beautiful)
or of an efficient cause (because of good's tendency to diffuse itself
and also because of the role it plays in efficient causality).
First of all, it comes as no surprise that St. Thomas gives a central
role to the final cause, even among non-intelligent agents. After
all, this notion is intimately connected with the natures, tendencies
and dispositions of all agents, including natural agents. This is
just Aristotelianism of the sort articulated in Physics 2. So the
good-to-be-realized is the first thing in the order of causing.
That is, the good sets in motion the action of the efficient
cause. By the same token, the good-to-be-realized is the last
thing in the order of being caused
or being realized.
The reply to the first objection
is one of the main sources for St. Thomas's way of drawing the
distinction between good and beautiful. In brief, he
associates good primarily
with affection and beautiful
primarily with cognition.
Question 6: God's Goodness
Question 7: God's Infinity
Question 8: God's Existence in Things
Question 9: God's Immutability
Question 10: God's Eternity
Question 11: God's Oneness
Question 12: How We Know God
- General Comments:
This question is far-ranging, beginning with the cognition of God had
by the blessed in heaven through the light of glory (a. 1-10) and
proceeding to the cognition of God that is possible for us in this life
through both grace and natural reason (a. 11-13). The first few
questions highlight the contrast between the beatific vision of God and
both (a) ordinary human knowledge that originates in the senses and (b)
natural angelic knowledge. In this way, the questions provide us
with an overview of St. Thomas's account of sensory and intellective
cognition.
- 12,1: As for
the possibility of a created intellect's seeing God's essence, St.
Thomas is adamant both that (a) God's essence is in itself the most
intelligible object, since each thing is knowable to the extent that it
is actual and God is pure actuality, and that (b) a created intellect,
whether human or angelic is, under the proper conditions, capable of
seeing God. The latter he simply takes to be an article of the
Faith, though one that is undergirded by our natural desire for
fulfillment and our natural desire to know the first cause of things.
- 12, 2-11:
Over
the next ten articles, which have to be read both forwards and
backwards (you know what I mean!), we get a summary of St. Thomas's
view of the natural
cognition had by men and angels and an account of what must be added to
the human and angelic intellects in order for them to see God
"face-to-face" in the beatific vision. Articles 2-6 concern our
cognitive power, its enhancement, and its mode of union with God when
we see Him face to face; arts. 7-11 deal with exactly what we know
when we see God face to face. All intellection on
the part of an intelligent creature
involves the union of known and knower or, more specifically, the
presence, in some mode, of the known in the knower.
Every instance of cognition requires both (a) a cognitive power
sufficient to grasp the object in at least some way and (b) the union
of the cognizer via the cognitive power with the object cognized.
For instance, in the case of human cognition, a material object
is united with the cognitive powers not with its very own esse (hmm, that rock won't fit in
my eye), but rather by having
a "likeness" of it "impressed" on
them, in a way analogous to that in which form can be thought of as
being "impressed" on matter in the things themselves. In the case
of
sensation, it is the material entities themselves that are causes of
the alterations of the sensory organs that constitute the sensory
act. That is, the act is just the sensory power's being "formed"
or "shaped" in the way characteristic of an act of sensing this
object,
e.g., a sensing of red or "red-sensing." (St. Thomas thinks that
the per se objects of the
sensory powers are colors, sounds, smells,
sounds and "feels," whereas their per
accidens (but non-inferential)
objects are things like substances as such, causes as such,
etc.) In the case of the intellective power, the intellect
is both active and passive. It is able to take the data delivered
by the senses and to fashion from it a mode of cognition that is
general or universal and not tied to the here and now. In
technical terms, the intellect as active (active or agent intellect)
"forms" or "shapes" the intellect as passive (passive or possible
intellect) in a way
characteristic of an act of understanding the object in question.
(The passive
intellect is like primary matter waiting to be fashioned by an agent,
viz., the agent intellect.) Hence, in both cases the union of
cognizer and what is cognized is effected by a formal configuration of
the cognitive power. Since these formal determinations are
distinct from God, we can call them "created formal determinations" or
"created likenesses." So when we have sensory or intellective
cognition of a material substance, it is not the case that the very
substance with its own natural esse
or of any of its accidents with
their own natural esse comes to
exist in
our senses or intellect. That is impossible. Rather, the
union is accomplished by the impression of a likeness (Latin species) on the cognitive power
(which is receptive in the manner of matter),
and it is by means of such a likeness that we are in cognitive contact
-- more specifically, cognitive union -- with the object.
Note that a different story has to be told about our cognition
of non-material objects -- including our own souls, given St. Thomas's
Aristotelian argument that intellection (unlike sensation) is not in
itself the operation of a material power, though it presupposes the
operation of those material powers that are the senses. In
particular, there cannot be any "likeness" of such things that exactly
parallels the likenesses of material objects. This is one
reason why we have to proceed by way of negation in our knowledge of
God and angels. (In the case of our own soul, we at least have a
grasp of our own intellective and sensory operations insofar as they
are directed toward material substances.)
As we learn in a. 3, this holds in spades for God. In order for
us to be united to God in a way sufficient for the beatific
vision, God must unite Himself to our minds with His very own esse in order for us to know
Him directly. What exactly does this
mean? First skip ahead and take a look at q. 14. a, 2, which
describes God's knowledge of Himself. He must be, so to speak,
united to Himself as an intelligible object. But since God is
immaterial, He can be literally united to Himself with His own esse.
As St. Thomas puts it, He is His own intelligible species, so that in
God the divine essence and act of understanding is the same as the
intelligible species. In the beatific vision, God is likewise the
mind's intelligible species. We participate in God's very
knowledge of Himself!
Let's take this one step at a time. According to the doctrine of
grace, grace is an
enhancement or elevation of our very nature (its subject, says St.
Thomas, is the essence of the soul and not just one of its powers) which even now gives us a
participation in the intimate Trinitarian life of God in the ways
specified by the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
If even now we have through the virtue of faith some share in God's
knowledge of Himself and of the created world, then the beatific vision
is the completion of what is begun with the "light of faith."
However, this in itself is not sufficient, since our cognitive
faculties are not naturally capable of being united to God in this
way. (The same holds for the cognitive faculties of angels as
well.) This is made clear in a. 4 and again in a. 11. In
our case, the reason
is that our natural mode of cognition limits us to entities that have
their esse in matter.
And neither our cognitive powers, nor those of an angel, have natural
cognition of subsistent esse,
i.e., of God. As far as God is concerned, our natural cognitive
powers are limited to knowing Him through His effects. (In our
case, we can occupy a middle status in this life through grace, which
gives us the light of faith (see below).) But they are also
characterized by
St. Thomas as a participation in the light of the divine
intellect. What we need in order to see God is a better light,
the light not of reason or even of grace, but the "light of
glory."
This makes us godlike, because God is the ultimate source and agent of
our intellectual activity and in the beatific vision He is known
through His essence as well. Hence, in knowing God through His
essence we have sublime and godlike knowledge of God and see all things
in our vision of Him.
What's more, in a. 6 St. Thomas asserts that to the extent that someone
loves God more, to that extent
one has a greater desire to see God and hence sees Him more
perfectly. "More perfectly" here has to do not with the object
(which is there for all the blessed to see), but seeing the object with
more clarity and depth and insight. So each of the blessed sees
God's essence with a depth that corresponds to his or her love for
God. Think of how in the present life deeper love of a person
produces more insight into that person.
As for this life, our natural knowledge of God is limited to what we
can know by the ways of negation, preeminence, and causality. In
short, we can establish that God is like nothing else that we have
experience of, but is instead an infinite being who stands outside of
the order of change and time but is nonetheless the immediate source of
being for whatever exists at any time and place. Grace gives us
more insight by revealing to us certain mysteries about God's inner
life and plan for our salvation, even while giving us a first beginning
of participation in God's life.
Question 13: The Names of God
- General comments:
In certain respects this question brings together everything that has
preceded it and relates it to our characteristically human manner of
making affirmations. There are some distinctions made by St.
Thomas that would be good to get out on the table before we go through
the articles.
- (Categorematic) spoken
term vs. concept (or conception):
A categorematic term is one
that signifies a substance or an accident (including actions). In
addition, language contains syncategorematic
terms such as prepositions, conjunctions, quantifiers, propositional
operators, etc., which enable us to make our talk about things
more exact and subtle.
According to St. Thomas,
"spoken words are signs of conceptions and conceptions are likenesses
of things." It is important to understand this distinction
correctly. On St. Thomas's view, an act of understanding consists
in the intellect (as passive) being formed or configured or "shaped"
according
to a likeness of
the object of cognition. The resulting actuality or act -- that
is, the thus-and-thus configured intellect -- is a conception and
constitutes our
understanding of that object, which in the first instance is a material
substance along with its accidents. Spoken words are signs of
such conceptions or understandings in the sense that they express them in a way that can be
used to communicate with others.
It is important, by the way, to understand that the "likeness" that St.
Thomas talks about here is not itself the first object of the act of
understanding; rather, it is by means of this likeness that the
intellect is
configured in, say, the "aardvark-way", and it is this
configuring that is an
act of understanding what an aardvark is. This is why St.
Thomas
says that the likeness (technically, the "intelligible species") is not
that which is
understood but that by which material
substances, in this case aardvarks, are understood.
So just as the form of aardvarkiness is that by which this matter is
organized into an aardvark, so the likeness of an aardvark is
that by which the mind is, as it were, configured in the "aardvark"
mode, which is just what the relevant act of understanding is.
And different conceptions (or concepts, which are habits
engendered by conceptions) are thus configurations that differ
intrinsically from one another (like the spoken words that express) and
thus have different objects.
Later, in the questions on the Trinity, St. Thomas will talk about the
mental speaking which he calls the "Word." This speaking, like
human speaking,
presupposes the act of understanding and expresses it mentally, just as
a spoken word expresses it audibly. This distinction helps us to
understand how it is that the while God's nature just is the divine act
of understanding and hence is shared by all three of the divine
persons, the generation of the divine Word yields the distinction
between the Father (the speaker) and the Son (Word that is spoken or
expressed).)
- Concrete term vs.
(corresponding) abstract term:
Categorematic terms come in pairs -- e.g., 'man'/'humanity',
'wise'/'wisdom',
'powerful'/'powerfulness', -- where (a) the concrete term can be
predicated of a particular substance and (b) the corresponding abstract
term directly signifies or names the form by virtue of which the
concrete term is predicable of the
substance. The reason why St. Thomas says that the concrete terms
connote composition is that in our experience a concrete term F
connotes something having F-ness,
so that there is a composition of subject (or suppositum) and form,
whether that form is a substantival form or an accidental form.
The form F-ness, by contrast,
does not
involve composition in itself; it is just that by which a composite is
F.
- That because of which a
term is imposed to signify vs. that which the term signifies:
The former has to do with the origin and etymology of the term, whereas
the latter involves the form that is in fact signified by the term,
regardless of its origin.
- That which a term
signifies vs. the term's mode of signification: On St.
Thomas's view a term always signifies a form. A concrete term
signifies a form and is predicable of the subject of that form, whereas
the corresponding abstract term signifies the form itself.
However, the concrete term signifies in a mode that implies a
subsistent subject having a form, and so a concrete term's mode of
signifying implies both subsistence and composition. We saw above
that an abstract term, by contrast, signifies just the formal component
by itself and hence does not imply composition in itself; however,
neither does it imply subsistence, since all the forms we naturally
know are such that they exist in some distinct subsistent
subject. This is why in the case of God we predicate both terms
of the divine nature -- so that, in effect, the concrete term's mode of
signifying indicates God's subsistence but is in tension with His
simplicity, whereas the abstract term indicates God's simplicity but is
in tension with His subsistence. We must use both sorts of terms,
because the one in effect cancels out the mistaken implications of the
other. And given the nature of our cognitive faculties and our
language, we cannot wholly transcend the limitations built into our
cognition and linguistic practice. (See below in 13,1.)
Also, St. Thomas distinguishes (a) terms that are such that they
signify
not only a perfection but a material mode of possessing that perfection
from (b) terms that are such that they signify a perfection but do not
directly signify a material mode of possessing it. (The latter
have a 'material' mode of signification, but this mode is not part of
what they signify when they are used to signify the perfection in
question.) So, for instance, 'lion' and 'powerful' can both be
used to signify power. But 'God (or Odysseus, for that matter) is
a lion' is a metaphorical predication, whereas 'God [or Odysseus] is
powerful' is a literal predication.
Now we are ready to turn to
the articles themselves.
- 13,1: Here
St. Thomas asserts that we can make true and proper (i.e.,
non-metaphorical) affirmative statements about God, but acknowledges
that our language is not altogether satisfactory because of the
dissonance between God's nature on the one hand and the mode of
signifying had by our "perfection" terms on the other. Note
throughout that St. Thomas takes ordinary language to be our only
language, and so the limitations of ordinary language are limitations
built right into the conceptions that spoken and written terms express.
This is inescapable for us -- sounds a bit like Wittgenstein, eh?
(I would classify Scotus, by contrast, as an "ideal language
philosopher" at least in this sense: he believes that we can
do better than ordinary language by fashioning a technical language
that is more precise than ordinary language. It seems to me that
this is the root of the famous dispute between Thomists and Scotists
about univocity and analogy in our language about God.)
- 13,2: St.
Thomas argues energetically against the view that none of our terms
signifies God's essence or substance (i.e., that they signify Him
substantivally), but that instead all of them signify either (a) the
negation of some creaturely attribute of Him or (b) the creature's
relation to Him as its first cause. If all of our terms
were like this, says St. Thomas, then all of our terms would be equally
appropriate or equally inappropriate in the case of God. But this
would amount to a complete agnosticism about God's nature. For
instance, if the claim is that we call God good only because He is a
cause of goodness in created things, then it would be just as
appropriate to call Him a body, given that He is the cause of
corporeality. Likewise, if we call Him living only in order to
deny that He is like inanimate things, then it is just as appropriate
to call Him a body in order to deny that He is like primary
matter.
St. Thomas's own view is crystal clear: "When God is said to be
good, the meaning is not that God is a cause of goodness or that God is
not evil; rather, the meaning is that what we call goodness in
creatures preexists in God and does so in some higher mode.
Hence, from this it follows not that 'good' belongs to God insofar as
He causes goodness, but rather, just the opposite, that because God is
good, He diffuses His goodness to things." (By the way, some
contest St. Thomas's attribution of the opposed view to "Rabbi Moses,"
i.e., Moses Maimonides. You'll have to take a course on
Maimonides to settle that issue. However, even if Rabbi Moses did
not hold this view, it's still a view that keeps popping up in
Christian as well as Jewish thought, often in reaction to
anthropomorphic views of God that underplay His transcendence.)
So even though creatures and creaturely perfections are that because of which the divine
names are imposed to signify, it does not follow that these names are
limited to signifying just the perfections of creatures (see ad 2). That is, pure
perfection terms such as 'living,' 'wise,' 'good', etc. are predicated
of God in His nature or substance and are not said of Him simply
because He is
the cause of creaturely perfections or related to creatures in some
other way. In other words, perfection-terms as predicated of God
say
something true about God in himself.
- 13,3: Here
St. Thomas makes explicit something he's been assuming all along, viz.,
that not all of our attributions to God are metaphorical. Here he
makes use of the distinction between what is signified and the mode of
signifying. In the case of metaphorical attributions what is signified by the term is
inextricably tied up with a participation in matter, whereas this is
not the case with proper attributions. Those attributions, when
they involve concrete terms signifying pure perfections, do imply
materiality in their mode of
signifying and in that
because of which they were imposed to signify, but not in what they signify.
- 13,4: Does
God's simplicity make it the case that all the terms properly
predicated of Him are synonyms? Since He is simple, and since we
say of Him, e.g., that He is wise (or that He is wisdom) and that He is
good (or that He is goodness), doesn't it follow that since He is both
His wisdom and His goodness, 'wisdom' and 'goodness' as attributed to
God are synonyms?
No, says St. Thomas. Non-synonomy is clear, St. Thomas asserts,
in the case of names
that deny something of God. All of them (e.g., 'incorporeality',
'timelessness', 'infinity') obviously signify something distinctive,
and each denies a different type of finitude of God. But what
about the names of the 'positive' perfections? St. Thomas reminds
us here that each of these names is associated with a distinctive
concept or conception. This is sufficient to make the names
non-synonymous. "For the concept signified by the name is the
intellect's conception of the reality signified by the name. But
since our intellect knows God from creatures, in order to understand
God it forms concepts proportioned to the perfections that proceed from
God to creatures. These perfections preexist in God in a simple
and unified way, whereas they are received in creatures in a fragmented
and diversified way. Therefore, corresponding to the diverse
perfections of creatures there is a simple unified principle,
represented in various and multiple ways by the diverse perfections of
the creatures; and in the very same way, corresponding to the various
and multiple concepts of our intellect there is a unified and
altogether simple being that is imperfectly understood by means of
conceptions of the sort in question. So even though the names
attributed to God signify a single reality, they are nonetheless not
synonyms because they signify that reality under many and diverse
concepts."
- 13,5-6: Given
what has gone before, we are prepared for St. Thomas's claim that the
names predicated of God are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally of God
and creatures. For the reality signified by
these names belongs to God, but not in the mode signified by the names,
since in God all of the perfections are found as a simple unified
subsistent substance. We have to, as it were, predicate the
perfections of
God under the cloud of God's simplicity and transcedence, and we
realize that we are
stretching our language to the hilt when we try to attribute
perfections to God. In calling this analogous predication,
St. Thomas uses Aristotle's paradigm of a term
that is associated with different but related concepts. Just as
medicine is
called 'healthy' by reference to the health which exists in the first
instance in an animal and because of which an animal is called
'healthy' in the primary sense -- and this by virtue of the fact that
the medicine is a cause of
health -- so too creatures are called, say,
'wise' by reference to the wisdom which exists in the first instance in
God through His essence and because of which God is called 'wise' in
the primary sense -- and this by virtue of the fact that created wisdom
is a participation in the
wisdom that exists in God through His essence in a
more eminent way than wisdom exists in creatures.
In a. 6 St. Thomas fills in this picture in a way that answers a
problem that occurs when we try to make precise the how the example of
'healthy' as predicated of an animal, of medicine, of blood, of urine,
etc, can be extended to the attribution of pure perfections to God
and creatures. The problem is to come up with a way in which
what is signfied by, say, 'wise' signifies something intrinsic in both
us and God -- this is where the example of 'healthy' fails, since
medicine and blood and urine, etc., are not, as it were,
intrinsically healthy, but are instead just signs of or causes of the
intrinsic health of animals.
First of all, notice that we can now give an
alternative characterization of the difference between terms used
properly of God
and terms used metaphorically of God. The latter are predicated
of
creatures in the primary sense and of God in a secondary or derived
way. The former, by contrast, are predicated of God, who is
uncreated
Wisdom, Life, Goodness, etc., in the primary sense and of creatures in
a secondary or derived way, insofar as they participate in a finite way
in the perfections so named. Notice that if 'God is wise'
meant
only 'God is a cause of created wisdom', then the primary sense would
be that which applies to creatures, and we would not really be saying
anything positive about God's nature itself when we called Him
wise. But, of course, St.
Thomas
insists that we are saying something about God's intrinsic nature and
not just about His causal effects. That's why the relevant terms
must be said to be predicated of God in the primary sense. God really
is wise, and
we are called wise only because we participate in His wisdom in a
finite way. St. Thomas
uses the Platonic notions of unparticipated
perfection and participated
perfection to deal with this problem. Wisdom, for
instance, is an
intrinsic attribute of both us and God, but it is uncreated and
unparticipated wisdom in God, whereas it is created and participated
wisdom in us. So 'wise' is used in the primary sense of God and
in a derived sense of creatures. More specifically, 'Socrates is
wise' means something like 'Socrates has wisdom that participates
in God's unparticipated wisdom'. Hence, 'wise' as applied to
creatures is defined by reference to God's unparticipated wisdom in
just the way that 'healthy' as applied to medicine is defined by
reference to the health of an animal.
Of course, St. Thomas adds the qualification that
even though we predicate such 'perfection terms' in the first instance (per prius) of God, they still have
a mode of
signification that belongs to creatures -- the concrete names because
their mode of signifying implies composition and the abstract names
because their mode of signifying implies existence in a subject rather
than per se subsistence.
Scotistic objection:
If each term has a res
significata and ordinary perfection terms signify this thing
absolutely while having a mode of signifying that implies finitude, why
can't we just invent new terms, e.g., 'wise*', 'good*', 'powerful*',
etc., that have the same res
significata but are wholly neutral with respect to their mode of
signifying, so that they can be predicated indifferently -- and hence
univocally -- of both God and creatures. St. Thomas's reply has
to be along the lines I suggested above when I contrasted 'ordinary
language' with 'ideal language' philosophy. And the reply is
simply to claim that an ideal language of the sort in question is
impossible for us to construct, and this because we are constrained by
our natural way of understanding the world. To identify such
limitations is not, contrary to what Scotists claim, a sufficient
condition for overcoming or eliminating them. The ultimate result
is that the
proposed terms 'wise*', 'good*' have the same mode of signification as
their ordinary counterparts and so cannot function as neutral
substitutes for them. This is clear from the fact that sentences
like 'Socrates is wise*' still imply a distinction between suppositum
and form and hence still fail to do justice to God's simplicity.
We are still forced to use both 'God is wise' and 'God is wisdom'
in tandem, as it were, in order to remind ourselves God eludes our
attempts to name Him.
- 13,7: This
question is important in part because it gives us a synopsis of St.
Thomas's understanding of the ontology of the Aristotelian category of relation, which is important here
but becomes even more important in his later discussion of the divine
persons. The immediate topic here has to do with those names of
God which imply the existence of creatures. The question is
whether such names are true of God only from a given point in
time. For instance, the name 'lord' implies things and persons
over which the lord has power, and the name 'creator' implies the
existence of things that have been created by the creator and even now
are being given esse by the
creator. So, it seems, what is signified by such terms was not
true of God from eternity, but was instead true only from a given point
in time.
On the surface this view seems to conflict with God's eternality and
immutability. If God went from not being a creator to being a
creator, then this would seem to imply a change in God (obj. 2).
What's more, these names seem to signify perfections (e.g., power)
which God did have from eternity, and so it seems to follow that terms
are predicated of Him from eternity (obj. 1). On the other hand,
it might seem that if terms such as 'lord' and 'creator' are predicated
of God from a given point in time, then so too are 'knowledge' and
'love', since Scripture tells us that God knew and loved creatures from
eternity (obj. 3). What's more, if relations are entities in the
things related, then since God's being is eternal and cannot be added
to, the reality signified by a name like 'lord' must have existed in
God from eternity (obj. 4), and to claim that this relation is only a
'relation of reason' and is not a reality in God is to deny that God is
really a lord or really a creator (obj. 5).
In order to sort out these questions, St. Thomas begins with an
exposition of the ontology of relation. First of all, we must
distinguish relational (or relative) names from the
relations
themselves. The question then becomes: "What ontological
force do relational names have? More specifically, do they
signify distinctive accidental entities which (in the case of
creatures) inhere in substances?" Some authors claim that
relational names never signify distinct relational entities, but rather
presuppose only the existence of absolute
(or non-relational) entities
that reason looks at in a certain way. On this view, for
instance, when I say that Socrates is similar to Plato in wisdom, the
only real entities signified are Socrates, Plato, Socrates's wisdom,
and Plato's wisdom. Given these entities and my cognition of
them, I then go on to compare Socrates and Plato and see that they are
similar. However, there are not two further entities, viz., a
similarity to Socrates that inheres in Plato and a similarity to Plato
that inheres in Socrates.
St. Thomas does not accept this view as a general account of the
signification of relational names. For instance, in the example
just given, he does believe that there are two further entities,
grounded in Socrates's wisdom and Plato's wisdom, one of which is
Socrates's similarity (in wisdom) to Plato and the other of which is
Plato's similarity (in wisdom) to Socrates. For real relations must always be
grounded in absolute entities,
in this case two qualities, viz., the wisdom that inheres in Socrates
and the wisdom that inheres in Plato. However, there are some
cases in which St. Thomas thinks that only relations of reason -- and not real relations -- are involved,
and, more interestingly, some cases in which there is a real relation
(or relational accidental entity) in one
of subjects and only
a relation of reason in the other
subject -- this last sort of case turns out to be especially relevant
in the case under discussion. (To make this a little less
mysterious right away, note that in some cases in which relational
terms come to be predicable of a pair of entities, this is because a real intrinsic change has occurred
in just one of the entities;
in some such cases there will be real relational accident in the entity
that has changed but only a relation of reason in the other
entity.) All this explains why in the response to a. 7 St. Thomas
takes the time to lay out this more complex account of relations in
some detail. So here it is.
Whenever a relational predication is true, we can distinguish three
elements, viz., (a) the extremes (i.e., the things related),
(b)
the grounds or foundations of the relation, i.e., the absolute
or non-relational entities because of which the extremes are related to
one another in
the relevant way, and (c) the relations themselves, one in
each
of the extremes. St. Thomas distinguishes three separate general
cases:
- The complementary
relations are merely relations of reason in both extremes:
These are cases in which cognition plays an essential role, i.e., a
role in the absence of which there would be no true relational
predication at all. For instance, when I say 'Socrates is the
same
(substance) as Socrates', this truth is grounded in the cognitional
activity of taking the same thing twice. There is no distinctive
accidental entity, viz., the relation of self-identity, that inheres in
Socrates. Rather, the truth 'Socrates is Socrates' or 'Socrates
is the same as Socrates' has a sufficient ground in Socrates's being
and oneness itself. Again, on St. Thomas's view the species aardvarkiness and its genus animality are related as that which
is included
to that which includes it. But this relation is a relation
of conceptual inclusion and
hence
depends on cognitional activity. The third example St. Thomas
uses is any relation between a being and a non-being. So suppose
that I assert 'Sam Gamgee is even more courageous than General
Eisenhower was'. In this case the relation between them depends
on
cognitional activity, both Tolkien's and mine.
- The complementary
relations are both real relations: In these cases, the
relations reflected in true relational statements are part of the
natural world, i.e., various orderings and connections that do not
depend on the activity of reason. On St. Thomas's view, all
relations that are based on real qualities and quantities and actions
and passions among creatures are of this sort.
- The complementary
relations are such that one is a real relation and the other is a
relation of reason: As St. Thomas tersely puts it, this
sort of situation obtains when the two extremes "do not belong to the
same order." For instance, the act of understanding a material
substance is intrinsically related to the substance it understands
under some conception or other; however, the thing understood is in the
"natural order" and is in no way altered or acted upon merely by being
understood by a human
knower. As a naturally existing entity, it is in the "natural
order" and not of itself in the "order of knowing." So, say
Aristotle and St. Thomas, when I say "The aardvark is known by me," the
truth of this proposition demands that there be a real accidental
relation in me founded in my act of understanding, but it does not
demand that there be a real relation being
known by Freddoso that exists in the aardvark. Rather,
the relation attributed to the aardvark is the result of the activity
of reason. In another interesting example, suppose that I assert,
"I am to the right of the column." Aristotle claims that in this
case there is a real relation being
to the right of the column that exists in me, but that there is
no corresponding real relation in the column. Why not?
Well, for one thing, there is no change in the column and the column
does not act on me, whereas I move
to a certain place. More deeply, however, descriptions such as
'to the right of' presuppose the perspective of a being with cognition
and hence presuppose cognitional activity.
The case of God and creatures
falls under the third set of examples. ( Notice that this does not follow
straightforwardly from God's simplicity. After all, God's wisdom
is a reality despite the fact that, given His simplicity, His wisdom is
not distinct from His essence. Later we will see that there are
indeed relational realities in God, though, once again, they are not
relational accidents but are instead the same as the divine
essence. These are the relations that constitute the divine
persons.) Creatures are dependent on God for their being
and
depend on God's governance of the world. This is a real
dependence relation that they have intrinsically and by
necessity and from a given point in time. But God's relations to
creatures are not real entities
-- even if these entities were thought of as being absorbed into the
divine
essence or nature. Such relations do not signal any change in
God, since God's creative and providential acts are the acts of a first
efficient cause who acts without being acted upon. For God's transeunt
action exists in its effects
(note the old scholastic dictum: actio
est in passo) and so it does not
signal a reality within
Himself, especially in view of the fact that God does not change by
virtue of creating things. God's transeunt action exists
outside
Himself in the creatures themselves or, at least, with the creatures as
its terminus. (See the material on the nature of action in
sections 3 and 4 of "Suarez
on
Metaphysical Inquiry, Efficient Causality, and Divine Action.")
Hence, given this ontological situation, it is perfectly appropriate
for those names that involve a relation to creatures to be predicable
of God only from a given point in time, viz., whenever there are
creatures of the appropriate sort.
- 13,8-10: The
next three articles concentrate on the name 'God'. In a. 8 St.
Thomas claims that this name is a name that signifies God's essence or
nature or substance, even
though it is imposed because of the effects of His action. In a.
9 he claims that even though the name 'God' is not shareable in
reality, nonetheless, because we understand God's nature in the manner
of a form existing in a suppositum, the name 'God' is shareable
"according to opinion." That is, one might mistakenly but
coherently believe that there is more than one god. If there is a
name of God that signifies God as an individual or a this-something (perhaps the Hebrew
name 'YHWH'), then that name is proper to God and in no way
shareable. Finally, in a. 10 St. Thomas asserts that pagans and
Catholics are not equivocating when the one asserts and the other
denies that a given idol is God. For they both mean to be talking
about the true God. Still, one can intentionally use the name
'God' to mean that which some people believe to be the
true God. Also, the name 'god' can also signify those who
have some participation in the life of the true God, viz., the blessed
in heaven, as in Athanasius's statement, "God became man so that men
might become gods." In these last two senses the name is used
analogously with '(true) God' as the focal meaning, and 'what some
believe to be the true God' and 'having some participation in a
likeness of the true God' as the derivative meanings.
- 13,11: Here
St. Thomas zeroes in on the biblical name "I Am Who Am" or "He Who Is"
and calls it "an especially proper name of God." This is because
it signifies God not under the conception of just some perfection or
other, but rather under the conception esse, which is God's nature:
"Names are predicated of God by us in a more proper way to the extent
that they are less determinate and more common and absolute," and the
name "He Who Is" signifies an "uncircumscribed (or infinite) sea of
substance."
- 13,12: This
article is in some ways a summary of all that has gone before.
There are true affirmative propositions about God, i.e., true
propositions attributing some perfection to God and not just denying
some imperfection of Him. Every simply true affirmative
proposition (or composition) is such that the form signified by its
subject and the form signified by its predicate are found in the same
suppositum or subject. As St. Thomas puts it, the predicate and
the subject signify something that is in some sense the same in reality
and diverse in concept. Our intellect cannot grasp God's simple
nature, but instead must bring together different conceptions or
concepts in forming such propositions. We thus can assert an
affirmative truth about God even while understanding that the modes of
signifying of the terms are in some sense inappropriate. The very
bringing together of subject and predicate are in a sense a way of
compensating for the inadequacy of the terms' mode of signifying, since
this propositional composition points toward God's simplicity insofar
as God's one and simple reality corresponds to all these
conceptions: "Therefore, the intellect represents the conceptual
plurality by means of the plurality of predicate and subject, whereas
it represents the unity by means of the composition of predicate and
subject."
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