Question 1 orients us towards theology’s proper end: deepening awareness of that communion where God’s true incomprehensibility is experienced. An important move here is to re-vision faith as reason’s counselor and guide rather than its opposite, and thus distinguish this theology—sacred doctrine—from metaphysics, while repositioning metaphysics to its service (“faith seeking understanding”). Since metaphysics seeks knowledge about God’s existence and nature, however, metaphysics seems at cross purposes with sacred doctrine, because for sacred doctrine to define God would be to conceive God as some sort of creature and thereby compromising the God of Scripture and of Christian Tradition: the intimate Creator who is Incomprehensible Source, Sustainer, and End of all creatures.
If metaphysics is to play a role in faith seeking understanding, Aquinas must correct its tendency towards “defining” God. He initiates his corrective in Question 1 by pointing out that all theological language, by its nature, is metaphorical. While not yet qualifying what “metaphorical” includes, Aquinas clearly intends to emphasize the flexibility of even the most mundane language to refer, indirectly, to the Divine.1 He asserts that even elevated language refers but indirectly to God, and here we must exercise enormous caution; better yet, we should use the lowest of language to refer to God rather than risk seeing God as some noble creature.2
Aquinas borrows from Dionysius to justify this restraint: “what [God] is not is clearer to us than what He is.” Aquinas takes most seriously Dionysius’ preference for negative interpretations of speech about God, repeating the caution at both the opening of Question 2 (on the existence of God) and the opening of Question 3 (on the simplicity of God). We must conclude that besides more flexibility in religious language-use, Aquinas promotes a thoroughly negative approach to theology. But simple negation is as perilous to Aquinas as positive language-use about God, because—as Kathryn Tanner points out—this cuts off the immediacy of God’s creative power and God’s intimately permeating presence.3 Negative interpretations tend to emphasize the Creator’s remotion rather than the Creator’s presence to creatures. For a negative interpretation of religious language to remain within the confines of orthodoxy, in speaking of God we must find a way to preserve God’s immanence as well as God’s transcendence.
However, “analogy” in and of itself is inadequate to accomplish Aquinas’ desire for his students, because he does not want simply to describe the relationship between Creator and creature, but to assist in their faith journey and train them to help others in theirs. “Analogy” too easily becomes another definition by which to pin God down. But Aquinas will not let his students off so easily, because in the questions leading up to his treatment of analogy Aquinas carefully qualifies the language of God-talk such that, despite saying a lot about God, in the end, the only thing we can declare—positively—is that we can say more than we know about God. On the other hand, our appreciation of God’s true incomprehensibility increases enormously, especially our discernment of God’s profound and penetrating presence to us.
Thus, Aquinas’ treatment of analogy, exercised as religious language-use through the previous questions, is not only non-contrastive but overcomes problems created by either positive or negative interpretations of God language. Aquinas transforms non-contrastive language by providing a way for negative theology to go beyond verbal cessation to deepening knowledge. “Deepening knowledge,” does not mean any kind of “information” about God, but rather, appreciation and awareness of God’s presence, and further, foretaste of the ultimate communion with the intimate and personal Creator for which the soul longs. The Summa does not end with a lesson on the most proper way to speak about God—this is only the beginning of Aquinas’ treatise. The Summa’s second part moves into theology’s practical concerns, centered on the human creature’s action, and finally in his third part, the movement of the human creature “back towards” its Source, accomplished through Jesus Christ and the work of the Holy Spirit, concretely realized in sacraments and other Christian forms of life. However, for these to be effective channels of grace, they must be grounded in awareness of the Creator’s unique relationship of transcendence-in-immanence to creation. This discernment is developed through faith seeking understanding, and, for Aquinas, this undertaking will be more fruitful if the believer becomes skilled in analogical language-use.
This chapter considers how Aquinas moves us from a static concept of “analogy,” used to describe the relationship between the Creator and creatures, to a dynamic realization of how language can be used to deepen awareness of God’s incomprehensibility, manifest in the practical and doctrinal theology constituting Christian forms of life. Question 2, considering God’s existence, lays out the elements making up Aquinas’ metaphysics, and begins maneuvering to preserve God’s unique distinction, effectively allowing God to remain truly incomprehensible. In Questions 3-11, considering God’s nature, Aquinas uses his metaphysics to exercise the reader in non-contrastive language-use. Questions 12-13 take the reader beyond non-contrastive language by linking how we attain knowledge concerning God to how we speak of God, providing an avenue for deepening awareness of God’s incomprehensibility and the possibilities of communion with our Source and End.
Article 1: Whether the Existence of God is Self-Evident
Article 2: Whether it is Demonstrable
Article 3: Whether God Exists
Having already carefully reoriented the relationship of faith to reason from one where faith opposes or replaces natural reason to one where faith guides and provides the existential (and eschatalogical) horizon for reason, it seems puzzling that Aquinas immediately turns in Question 2 to proving the existence of God; because Question 1 seems to call into question both the necessity and the value—as well as the effectiveness—of such argumentation.
Recall the objections of Question 1, Article 8 drawing upon the association of natural reason and argumentation: since sacred doctrine borrows its first principles from the scientia Dei, whose principles cannot be demonstrated, they must be taken on authority; and authority, the objection asserts, “is the weakest form of proof.”4 Aquinas’ response re-affirms sacred doctrine’s superiority despite its own inability to prove its principles (not part of its task). Rather, argumentation based on the highest authority—divine revelation—is stronger than argumentation based on reason, provided that “the opponent admits some at least of the truths obtained through divine revelation.”5 Indeed, sacred doctrine employs argumentation based on natural reason, not to prove matters of faith, but to clarify the content of faith, which in Christianity is Jesus Christ’s saving significance: living transformed lives in light of the life, death, and resurrection of God-become-human. This implies, does it not, that God’s existence is assumed as a matter of faith, so how can it be sacred doctrine’s task to prove it so? After all, how and why God’s existence pertains to salvation is the concern of sacred doctrine; whether God exists is a question more relevant to metaphysics, whose subject matter is being.6 However, before Aquinas proceeds with his treatise on how humanity specifically obtains its pre-ordained goal, Aquinas takes up the thesis of God’s being—that is, God’s existence and nature—virtually inviting a philosophical approach to his whole work.
This difficulty may be why many scholars tend to analyze the Summa as a work of metaphysics rather than as a work of sacred doctrine.7 Because Question 2 takes up the fact of God’s existence, and those questions immediately following it examine the nature of that existence, it might seem Aquinas intends his Summa to be a presentation of his metaphysics. It is therefore easy to separate this first part of the Summa from its introductory first question as well as its more pastoral second part and doctrinal third part. However, this puts Aquinas into a precarious position regarding his philosophical competency, especially in modern thought, which incorporates a radically different cosmology and world view than that to which Aquinas was privy.
Many scholars unfortunately take their starting point from Aquinas’ second question, after perhaps giving a passing nod to his first question on sacred doctrine as a matter of politeness. Undeniably, at first glance there seems to be a discontinuity between Questions 1 and 2, compelling the reader to choose one approach over the other (sacred doctrine or metaphysics). But some scholars force the association of metaphysics with the Summa even further by extracting Question 2, not only from Question 1, but from the Summa itself, as if the Summa was a catalog of metaphysical topics such as “existence” and “attributes.”8 Furthermore, much of the scholarship on Question 2 considers only the answer to Article 3, the “Five Ways” of proving God’s existence, apart even from its preceding articles and surrounding text. Having sequestered the Five Ways from any distracting contextual elements, the proofs are considered on their own merits. Thus Question 2 has become a topic of controversy among scholars with regard to its place and function in the Summa as well as the soundness of Aquinas’ proofs.
Leo Elders, for example, asks: “Do we have the right to isolate the Five Ways in I 2, 3 from their theological context and consider this passus merely from a philosophical point of view?”9 His answer is emphatically, “yes,” based upon the article immediately preceding the proofs which concludes that God’s existence is a preamble of faith rather than an article of faith, and therefore falls within the allowance of natural reason (meaning it may be taken on faith but can be demonstrated by reason)—although later he checks himself by acknowledging scriptural authority provides the pretext for the demonstrations.10 But this concession carries more weight than Elders cares to give it. Not surprisingly, his interest in Question 2, and the Five Ways particularly, concerns its contribution to Aquinas’ metaphysics.
Separating the Five Ways from its context consequently reveals the proofs’ weaknesses, especially the glaring defect, philosophically speaking, common to them all: each ultimately assumes the God as Creator at the outset in order to establish the existence of the being concluded at the end of the demonstration. Anthony Kenny, maintaining Aquinas intended his Five Ways to be taken “as seriously as he meant any other philosophical proof,”11 argues that they fail principally because they cannot be separated from the medieval cosmology providing the background for each proof. This cosmology rests on the underlying presumption that the order of the universe reflects the design and intelligence of God, seen in the inherent tendency for created things to act for an end; cosmological arguments are, for this reason, often referred to as arguments from design or teleological arguments. Kenny is adamant that Aquinas’ “proofs” are unacceptable, not only because the cosmology upon which he bases his proofs has been radically revised, but more importantly because arguments from design or teleology are logically invalid: they are tautological.
Victor Preller, taking the proofs as tangential, “even dangerous” to Aquinas’ doctrine, questions the assumption of scholars that Aquinas presented the Five Ways as expressions of his own philosophical understanding of God’s existence. Indeed, labeling Aquinas’ arguments as “cosmological” would tie God too closely to creation to “satisfy Christian demands for his ‘otherness’ or transcendence.”12 Preller accepts the unsoundness of the cosmological argument, insisting Aquinas’ Five Ways must be radically re-read in light of the questions which immediately follow it. He reproaches,
[i]f we take the proofs of the existence of God to be convincing forms of argumentation, we may claim to know that the natures of things, as they really are in their own esse, derive from “forms” inherent in the “intellect” of an “intentional being.”13
We know by now, of course, that Aquinas immediately asserts at the opening of Question 3 that we cannot know the essence of God, a warning he forecasts even earlier, in his prelude to Question 2: “Considering the Divine Essence, we must consider: 1) Whether God exists?; 2) The manner of His Existence, or, rather, what is not the manner of His existence.” Preller insists Aquinas intends his readers to take him seriously that we cannot know “what God is”; it would therefore seem contradictory to attempt to prove that God exists14—unless, for Aquinas, God’s existence is just as much a part of this negative theology as God’s essence. And, as we see in his outline of the Prima pars, Aquinas includes the question of God’s existence under consideration of God’s essence. Therefore, focusing on Question 2’s proofs of God’s existence jeopardizes a negative reading of the whole section. Preller indicates that, far from proving God’s existence through several versions of the cosmological argument, Aquinas intends just the opposite:
he intended to posit in existence an unknown entity whose very relationship to the world is equally unknown. … Aquinas’ intention in quoting the proofs can be understood only … in the light of the immediately succeeding questions in which the intelligibility of God is defined in negative terms.
What then can we make of Aquinas’ presentation of the Five Ways supposedly proving God’s existence, or his inclusion at all of such a question in his Summa—a work Aquinas claims in his preface as well as in Question 1 to be directed towards sacred doctrine? Certainly the content of the arguments and also much of the content of the following questions makes use of metaphysical principles; furthermore, the arguments’ form is definitely recognizable as “cosmological.” How is it possible to understand these arguments in light of the supposedly negative theology Aquinas posits for speaking about God’s essence?
W.J. Hankey ascertains that the Five Ways “do more than indicate that he is, they involve insight into the divine essence.”15 Hankey, like Preller, sees Question 2 closely tied to the following questions about God’s nature; in fact, Question 2 provides a plan for how Aquinas is going to proceed in Questions 3-11. If this is the case, we must pay attention to how Aquinas introduces and lays out the metaphysics he uses to teach us how to speak about God. Furthermore, if the Five Ways intend to do more than supply proofs, it is important to ask how the demonstrations work together—how their arrangement prepares for the proceeding questions. Given this possibility, it is likely that, since each demonstration is obviously fraught with weakness on its own, there may be something in their organic unity into which Aquinas wants to draw his readers.
Finally, granting an essential link between Question 2 and those which follow, it is certainly valid to expect that the question of God’s existence is inextricable from the context of faith elaborated in the Summa’s opening question. As we are introduced to Question 2, it is clear Aquinas intends his treatment of God’s existence to flow directly from his explication on the method and aim of sacred doctrine, because he opens not only with explicit reference to Question 1, but also to the plan of his Summa as a whole:
Because the chief aim of sacred doctrine is to teach the knowledge of God, not only as He is in Himself, but also as He is the beginning of things and their last end … we shall treat (1) of God; (2) of the rational creature’s advance towards God; (3) of Christ, Who as man, is our way to God.
He continues by dividing his treatment of God into three parts, the first of which, “Whatever concerns the Divine Essence,” contains the question of God’s existence:
Considering the Divine Essence, we must consider: 1) Whether God exists? (2) The manner of His Existence, or, rather what is not the manner of His existence (3) Whatever concerns His operations.
Here, as Aquinas introduces a topic seeming to fall readily within metaphysical inquiry, he advises he does not for a moment propose to depart from his Scriptural (exitus/reditus) narrative: creation–sanctification–redemption. Further, including the question of God’s existence under the heading of God’s essence gently reminds us that this presentation will, at best, refer to God inadequately, so a negative interpretation is preferred to misinterpretation. Thus he establishes from the beginning of Question 2 the way to read it, together with what follows, in light of faith seeking understanding (as Question 1 establishes), and, having done this, expectedly there is more to his philosophical treatment than meets the eye.
Article 1 begins with the objection that God’s existence is self-evident, implanted in us by God. This appears to support a reading in light of sacred doctrine, because, recall in Question 1, we must have some knowledge of God in order to orient our actions towards our divinely- intended end in God. Aquinas’ reply reminds us this is an inchoate awareness of God, implanted only in a “general and confused way.” Indeed, with this qualification Aquinas sets up the need for demonstrating God’s existence—apparently moving towards a philosophical reading. But in his answer Aquinas performs a sleight of hand, continued into the next article, which allows the later philosophical demonstrations to serve sacred doctrine’s goal.
In order to catch the trick, both second and third objections must be scrutinized: the second objection combines Aristotle’s notion that the first principles of demonstration are self-evident with Anselm’s Proslogian definition of God as “that which nothing greater can be conceived”; while the third objection, based on Scripture, aligns truth with the self-evident. Aquinas quickly disposes of the third objection by declaring something can be self-evident in itself, but not to us; this should remind us of a parallel, drawn from Question 1, that the truth of something can be certain in itself (God’s knowledge), but not to us (for example, because of lack of intellectual capacity).16 His example in Question 2, Article 1, relies on predication and foreshadows the following series of questions (3-11): God’s existence is self-evident, for to say God exists is to say something about the essence of God which sets God off from everything else that is created. But this is hardly self-evident to us, because we do not know what it means for one’s essence to be its own existence.
Now for the first part of the trick: the objections imply that, in the proposition “God exists,” roughly equaling “God is (God’s own) Existence” or “God’s essence is God’s existence,” Anselm’s definition—“that which nothing greater can be conceived”—may be substituted for “Existence.” For Aquinas, however, since we cannot conceive of something whose existence is the same as its essence, God’s existence is as unknown to us as God’s essence, and therefore cannot be in any manner self-evident to us. God’s existence, no matter how formulated propositionally, must be interpreted negatively. Second, Anselm’s definition should alert us to yet another potential danger: conceiving God as resembling the most noble creature (which just happens to be greater than we can conceive).17 This leads us to the second part of the trick, and to Article 2. Aquinas has already asserted in his answer to Article 1 that, since God’s existence is not self-evident to us, it “needs to be demonstrated by things that are more known to us.” In Article 2, “Whether it can be demonstrated that God exists,” Aquinas shows us the manner and limits of such demonstration, providing the key to how Aquinas’ metaphysics actually go beyond proving anything about God—rather, serving sacred doctrine’s end.
To the objection that God’s existence cannot be demonstrated because it is an article of faith, Aquinas replies that God’s existence is a preamble of faith and therefore may be known by natural reason. Aquinas further reminds us that faith and reason are not opposed, indeed “faith presupposes natural knowledge.” However, demonstration, as a mode of natural reason, must be qualified when applied to the divine; proofs of God’s existence will be no exception. In demonstrations proceeding from effects (rather than from the cause itself), the effect “takes the place of the definition of the cause.” As the second objection points out, essence is the middle term of demonstration, but since we cannot know God’s essence, names of God derived from effects, though substituting for the middle term, do not refer to God’s essence. Aquinas will, of course, further qualify this qualification in Question 13 with reference to predicating perfections; however for the moment, allowing but limiting the power of effects to substitute in demonstrations of God’s existence serves Aquinas’ negative perspective, which he takes one step further in his final reply: perfect knowledge of God is not possible.
The third objection draws attention to the major difficulty in substituting effects for God’s existence: God’s effects are not proportionate to God, because “between the finite and infinite there is no proportion.” The absence of proportion between Creator and creature is not the main problem that must be addressed in demonstrating God’s existence, but it looms large in predicating names of God and, ultimately, in speaking meaningfully about the Creator–creature relationship. Aquinas’ reply raises the question of what we expect from demonstrations of God’s existence; certainly, it cannot be “perfect knowledge” of God’s essence. By “perfect” knowledge, this means our knowledge of God cannot be proportionate to its object, and this lack of proportion refers us yet again back to the relationship between the Divine and the “non”-divine. As in the case of faith and reason, what is considered Divine and what is not divine are not opposed, nor can they be identified with each other.
Recall the definition Aquinas previously gave, and rejected, where God is “that of which nothing greater can be conceived.” The problem here is assuming a proportion between God and the world: although we cannot conceive of it, the Creator is at the very top of the chain of creatures. This is like saying there is some number so great that it simply cannot be conceived because of a person’s limited ability to count high enough. But Aquinas does not accept this notion of God’s infinite “greatness” because the finite is not proportionate to the infinite. Rather, the infinite is the source and ground of the finite—the infinite Creator is the source and ground of the finite creature’s existence.
In these first two articles Aquinas implicitly re-orients our expectations of “demonstrating” away from proving that God is to expressing (and affirming) the relationship of Creator and creature. Aquinas rejects Anselm’s definition on two grounds: 1) the signification for God as “that which nothing greater can be conceived” is not a term that can be known—and therefore used in demonstrating—since there is nothing else with which to compare one whose existence and essence are the same; 2) anything greater than could be conceived may be misunderstood as being proportionate to things that can be conceived, which God is not. This objection to Anselm is implicit in Article 2, where Aquinas reaffirms there is no proportion between an infinite cause (God) and a finite effect (creatures). Yet, a qualified demonstration is warranted precisely because God is assumed to be the cause of creatures. Consequently the definition of God as “that which nothing greater can be conceived” must be rejected ultimately because it fails to include the relationality upon which the whole of Scripture as well as Christian life is based; Anselm’s definition says nothing about God as Creator. Thus any demonstration not based on God as Creator is irrelevant to sacred doctrine and meaningless to the believer.
What is meaningful, and therefore to be demonstrated, is God’s existence as Creator. Prior to investigating the nature of God’s existence—the topic of the following questions—it must be established that the God we are assuming has a specific existence vis-à-vis creatures. This re-orientation follows upon the demands of sacred doctrine as laid out in Question 1 as well as the structure of the Summa as a whole. The question of whether God exists cannot be divorced from the Creator–creature relationship, that is, how we are to form our lives to that end, and how God is present to us in such a way that that end may be fulfilled. Demonstration of God’s existence, though qualified, is needed, not to convert the non-believer (although it might, if the non-believer were to connect these “proofs” with existentially important moments in his or her life), but to keep believers from falling into heresy of a “pagan” god, that is, a God who could be compared/contrasted with the world. Far from slighting sacred doctrine’s ultimate purpose, demonstrations of the Creator-God’s existence may facilitate the journey towards faith’s fulfillment.
1. From motion
2. From the nature of the efficient cause
3. From possibility and necessity
4. From the gradation found in things
5. From the governance of the world
In the first two articles of Question 2, Aquinas justifies the need to demonstrate God’s existence while subtly preparing his readers to approach such “proofs” guided by faith’s requirements: it is not enough to prove the existence of a god; it is the Creator God of Scripture that is sought. Yet, it is of course Aquinas’ perspective that the God of Scripture and the god of philosophy need not be at odds: with regard to God’s nature, certain “formal features” must be attributed in order for God to be God—for example, simplicity, immutability, infinity—and as Maimonides observes, these features must indeed be attributed to the God of Scripture, though they must also be interpreted negatively, in order to preserve a sense of God’s incomprehensibility.18
Accordingly, while Aquinas is determined not to depart from the goals of sacred doctrine, he also takes the opportunity to begin preparing his readers for the metaphysics which will be unfolded throughout his following treatment of God’s nature. Before his presentation of the Five Ways, Aquinas introduces the concepts of causality and participation essential to developing a metaphysics that will serve to orient his students—and, with any luck those to whom the future teachers and preachers minister—towards sacred doctrine’s salvific goal. In the second article, Aquinas refers to God as cause and, implicitly, creatures as God’s effects. This articulation allows Aquinas to relate the god of philosophy to the Creator God of Scripture, and at the same time maintain an intimate relationship between Creator and creature. Philosophically speaking, the relationship between the cause, or first principle, and its effects (creation) is commonly referred to as the metaphysics of participation. Yet in order to compensate for the problems raised by the philosophical approach—namely, how God as cause remains incomprehensible—Aquinas must develop a corrective: as Article 2 clearly indicates, knowledge of this unique relationship between cause and effect is not proportionate. Furthermore, as Aquinas has maintained from the beginning of the Summa, the only way to avoid such misunderstanding is to pay careful attention to how creaturely words are attributed to this ultimate Cause.
In Article 3, which presents the Five Ways, Aquinas introduces his metaphysics by attending to the way God’s incomprehensibility may still be maintained while permitting the creature to participate in God’s existence. Rather than being concerned with whether each demonstration is philosophically sound and self-contained, Aquinas is concerned to move our articulations about God out of the realm of ordinary speech in a way that demonstrates God’s existence to be uniquely distinct from the world. By laying a foundation where the Creator may be articulated as the ground and source of the creature—the one who causes and sustains the existence of all things—the “formal features” of God presented in the following questions may be understood non-contrastively as relating to the world transcendently, yet intimately, though incomprehensibly, present.
Article 3 opens with the objection that there would be no evil if God existed, because God is understood to be the contrary of evil: infinite goodness. Second, there is no need to suppose God’s existence because the world may be explained by natural principles. The sed contra pits philosophy against Scripture by asserting, from Exodus, that God is named “I am Who am”: Not only does God exist, but God is the One Who Exists, indeed Existence itself. Aquinas answers that the existence of God can be proved (probare), or better, tested, in five ways, thus suggesting that philosophy may be used to support the scriptural affirmation of God’s existence.
The First Way begins with motion. “Nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act.” Motion is the reduction from potentiality to actuality, and only something in the state of actuality can move something from potentiality to actuality. The problem is that this movement cannot go on into infinity; therefore, there must be something, being fully actual, that does not, cannot and never contained any potentiality; this is Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover,” and “this everyone understands to be God.”19
Kenny observes, from Aquinas’ text, that the Latin “motus” should more properly be translated as “change” than motion, pointing to Aquinas’ adherence to Aristotle, who distinguishes between change of quality, change of quantity, and change of place.20 Kenny also shows that the so-called “infinite regress argument” does not, in fact, prove God’s existence because it does not demonstrate there is “an unmoved mover at all resembling God.” For Kenny, to reach the God Aquinas intends, “unmoved” must mean “changing in no respect.”21 Contrary to Kenny’s own thesis, however—that Aquinas meant for his arguments to be taken as proper proofs for God’s existence, but that each proof is fraught with weaknesses and inevitably fails22—understanding motus as change is the first step in establishing the God of Scripture. But this will not be obvious until we follow through with the other four arguments and take up the questions on God’s essence, especially regarding God’s immutability. For immutability is concerned with the unchanging nature of God. The Creator God of Scripture must be, as Kenny observes, “changing in no respect” but at the same time active in and through the existence of creatures. The implications of this paradox are disclosed only by a non-contrastive grasp of religious language such as employed by Scripture and lived out in the lives of the faithful.
The important part of the first argument is not the definition of God as “unmoved mover” but Aquinas’ introduction of Aristotle’s act and potency. By articulating the “unmoved mover”—implicitly at this point in the arguments—as fully actual, Aquinas can table the problem of God’s immutability for the time being because in order to “change” in the creaturely sense of the word, a thing must contain some potentiality, that is, the potential to change or move towards something else. God, understood as fully actual, has nothing to change into and nothing to move towards but rather becomes the very end of the changing into and moving towards of all beings that contain any potentiality. Thus, the introduction of act and potency in effect sets up the relationship wherein the creature not only enjoys an immediate relationship with its Creator, but, due to its very incompleteness, imperfection, finitude—or whatever else it may be called—finds its fulfillment and end in communion with its Source. In other words, the potential (potency) of the creature for transformation allows it to participate in the existence (act) of its Creator.
However, it is difficult, if not impossible, to see the profound implications of act and potency as presented in the first argument of the “unmoved mover,” because it is deficient as a proof for the existence of the Creator God of Scripture: an “unmoved mover” does not necessarily have an immediate or an intimate relationship to any other being as does the God of Scripture. Furthermore, simply understood as unmoved mover, what distinguishes this god from other beings does protect God’s distinction from the world except that it has no mover. In order to arrive at an understanding of God as distinct yet immediate, Aquinas needs to take several more steps, the first of which is to introduce act and potency into the definition of God. This subtle modification is evidence Aquinas intended his proofs to work together in moving away from the Aristotelian god of philosophy towards the God of Scripture.
The Second Way re-articulates the God–World relationship as one of cause and effect. Aquinas observes, “[i]n the world of sense … there is an order of efficient causes … [but] … there is no case known in which a thing is … the efficient cause of itself.” Drawing upon the same principle as in the First Way—nothing can go on ad infinitum—Aquinas arrives at a first efficient cause, one that is itself uncaused, “to which” he asserts, “everyone gives the name [nominant] of God.” This proof, although similar to the proof of the unmoved mover, draws one step closer to the God of Scripture because, as Kenny himself notes, “[t]wo of the best known Aristotelean theses about causation were that effects were like their causes and that causes were prior to their effects.”23 While the unmoved mover has neither an immediate nor an intimate relation to the world, the first efficient cause has at least one essential feature similar to the Creator God of Scripture: the resemblance of its effects to itself, calling to mind Genesis, where God says, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.”24 Affirming that the human creature enjoys a close—even familiar—relationship to its Creator by virtue of the Creator’s causality is so important that it is repeated in the next Scriptural passage:
God created humankind in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.25
Like the relationship of first efficient cause to its effects, the Creator God is both prior to creatures, having created them, and “familiar” to creatures in the sense that they somehow—though incomprehensibly—reflect their maker.
The first efficient cause moves yet another step forward in presenting the Creator God: it must be distinct from any worldly cause. Aquinas implies this at the beginning of the proof in observing there is no case in the world of sense where a thing is its own efficient cause. Establishing there must be an efficient cause transcending any worldly cause appeals to the existence of effects; if there be no ultimate cause, then ultimately there would be no effects. Now, for obvious reasons, this proof appears to be unsound from a philosophical standpoint: in order to see God as cause, the world must be interpreted as an effect (or series of effects) and for that to be so, the cause must be assumed from the outset, since by definition an effect includes the notion of its cause—therefore the argument is circular. But the argument does make sense from a theological standpoint: it hints at the doctrine of creation that lies at the heart of all faith statements and which provides the foundation for how human beings are to live—as creatures whose beginning and end (and everything in between) is inextricable from their Creator, an end that lies beyond the world that is finite and corruptible. Only a Creator that transcends this worldly finitude can preserve a beloved creature from its own fall back into non-existence;26 only a Creator that is itself exempt from the possibility of falling back into non-existence can achieve this act. Such a Creator must be fully actual—containing no potentiality at all—as well as uncaused, and there is nothing in “the world of sense” that meets these requirements.
While both the First and the Second Ways do not make any direct reference to God’s distinction from the world, these subtle moves Aquinas makes within the demonstrations (for example, including act and potency in the definition of the unmoved mover) and between the demonstrations (shifting from God as “unmoved mover” to “first efficient cause”) make room for this interpretation. Preller picks up on the implications of Aquinas’ modifications from the First Way. He keenly perceives that
[w]hatever Aquinas’ first mover is doing (whatever “power” or “agency” he is communicating to objects in the world) it has nothing to do with motion as it “is certain and evident to our senses.” Aquinas is reading Aristotle’s argument, but he is hearing or intending the Doctrine of Creation.27
Preller senses here that Aquinas is wrestling with the problem inherent to the philosophical proofs that there is no direct way to articulate the Creator God of Scripture. Unless the argument is modified in such a way that removes God from ordinary experiences of the world, God is either too attached to the world or too removed from it. Yet, scholars such as Elders28 point out that Aquinas begins each of his Five Ways from the world of the senses: the first on the basis of our perception of motion in the world; the second on the basis of our observations that certain causes yield corresponding effects. Aquinas has already established in the previous articles of this question that, by necessity, all demonstrations begin with the senses, because this is the mode of human knowing. On the other hand, unless guided by faith, this knowledge does not lead to the God of Scripture, but at best to the pagan god of the philosopher. And faith assumes a God whose existence is as immanent as it is transcendent. This is the theological interpretation of God’s distinction from the world.
Thus far, the first two demonstrations have created the space for God’s transcendence by beginning with our understanding of motion and causality in the world of sense and appealing to a being that must be the origin of these worldly phenomena, without being subject to them. However, both demonstrations lack the sense of God’s necessity with regard to the Creator’s own continued existence as well as that of creation. In other words, God must transcend the world in yet another way: it must be impossible for God not to be at any given time. In the first demonstration, there is nothing to prevent God from being the first mover and then going out of existence; likewise, in the second demonstration, there is nothing to prevent God from causing the first worldly efficient cause and then ceasing, leaving nature to continue its own causality. But this is far from the God of faith, who is so immediate and so intimate that creation relies on its Creator to continually sustain its existence, and who keeps it from falling back into the nothingness from whence it came.
Aquinas takes up this issue in his Third Way. Once again beginning with the world of the senses, he observes that in nature there are things that “are possible to be and not to be,” given the contingency and corruptibility of created things. At some point, the logic goes, we must come to something whose existence is absolutely necessary—that is, not only incorruptible, but whose necessity is itself uncaused—otherwise there would be nothing in existence. This is so because, if it were possible that everything could not-be at some time, there would be nothing to begin being at all. In other words, non-being would regress back infinitely, and at some point there would be nothing from which to begin creation, for everything that could possibly not be, at some time did not exist. And the unstated implication is that should there be a being who, having created, ceases to be, then at some point in time, there will again be nothing, since all contingent things inevitably pass away: “it is impossible for these always to exist, for that which is possible not to be at some time is not.” There must be a being who is excluded from this possibility. This absolutely necessary being, Aquinas asserts, “all men speak of [dicunt] as God.”
This proof may be the most difficult of all of the arguments that Aquinas presents; but so much rides on it that it must be carefully examined. The language Aquinas uses in this demonstration is tricky, because it is tempting to speak of God’s “eternity” to explain how God is distinct from creatures with regard to their contingency and corruptibility. One problem with speaking of God’s distinction as “eternal” is that we also have cases of creatures being eternal; for instance the beatified, who, having passed through earthly life, “rest eternally with God” despite having been created as contingent and corruptible beings, who could have been or not been, and whose earthly life was sure to pass away at some time. And angels, though perhaps spoken of as eternal, are still created, and thus contain some contingency.
Aquinas will take up God’s eternity later in Question 10, after considering God’s infinity, and there he will be in a position to develop this essential feature non-contrastively in order to allow us to speak more intelligibly about the Creator–creature relationship—especially that with which sacred doctrine is ultimately concerned, between the beatified and the One with whom they have been reunited. However, at this stage in the lesson, as he is introducing the major components of his metaphysics, Aquinas must be careful to avoid a misleading interpretation of God’s existence. Although he refers here in the third proof to a “time” in which things “may not be,” he refrains from attributing the term “eternal” to a being for whom there is no possibility of non-existence, because that would directly oppose God’s “eternity” with time or could ever lead us to the conclusion that eternity is an “infinitely” long time. Ultimately, this interpretation compromises God’s distinction from the world as well as prevents Aquinas from further moving towards developing the metaphysics of participation that he will introduce in following demonstrations.
Aquinas emphasizes that God’s existence goes beyond duration in time (past, present, or future); more is at stake than the capacity (or not) to count “infinitely” backwards to a time where God came into existence. God’s infinity is about the nature of creation’s dependency upon its Creator. Before Aquinas takes up God’s eternity, he considers God’s infinity—and in so doing he will move it away from its association with quantity (for example, duration of time or number of causes). But for now, Aquinas allows us to assume our conventional understanding of “infinity” so he can appeal to the philosophical concept of “infinite regress” to move God out of the ordinary world of sense experience. In Question 10, which follows God’s infinity, Aquinas considers God’s eternity, and there he will shift the discussion away from temporal language, so eternity and time may be spoken of non-contrastively, by re-articulating eternity in terms of immutability.
Instead of speaking of God’s eternity here in his Third Way, which would present a more immediate problem than the conventional notion of infinity he has employed in the previous two demonstrations, Aquinas refers to God’s necessity to communicate creation’s reliance on God for existence—not simply in the sense of being created or caused by God, but in the sense that without God, creation would neither come to be nor remain in existence; there would simply be nothing. Although Aquinas does use temporal language, his demonstration is not about how long God must have been in existence (that is, always), but why God’s existence is necessary rather than contingent: to create and sustain all things. The notion of God’s absolute necessity includes everything that has been affirmed in the first two Ways: first, God is fully actual, containing no potentiality whatsoever, and second, God is uncaused. But God’s necessity goes beyond the unmoved mover and first efficient cause in that God’s existence is interminably required for anything to have ever existed and, we must assume, for anything to continue to exist, because if a created thing’s cause could not-be, then so could its effect.29 And by God’s “interminable” existence—as it is being used improperly here—more than unending time is indicated. The Christian doctrine of creation is undeniably intended, for nothing could exist “prior” to God’s existence, and this implies not only that God is the author of time itself, but more importantly that God creates ex nihilo. Furthermore, at any time the existence of all things will fall back into nothingness without God’s continual causality. Thus, God is both the Creator and Sustainer of creation.
Given the immediacy of the Creator’s existence to creation suggested by the previous (third) argument, Aquinas is now in the position to formally introduce the basic structure of his metaphysics of participation central to the Creator–creature relationship. In his Fourth Way, Aquinas shifts his attention back to God’s effects, as he takes up the gradation found in created things. Recall that in the Second Way Aquinas appeals to God’s effects, creatures, as evidence of their ultimate efficient cause, a move correlating well with Scripture, where God creates all things directly and human creatures in the divine image and likeness. From the Third Way we discover God not only creates but remains present to creation, because there is never a moment wherein divine causality can be absent; furthermore, this causality of necessity must exclude any contingency whatsoever, or creation is doomed to fall back into nothingness. Whereas in the first and second demonstrations Aquinas establishes God’s existence as necessarily transcendent, within the second and third demonstrations, Aquinas begins to establish God’s existence as necessarily immanent. Unlike the unmoved mover, who sets the first thing in motion, the first efficient cause in the Second Way creates each thing directly; and furthermore, although the first efficient cause is “outside” of the world because it is exempt from causality, the worldly effects resemble it in some manner. In the Third Way, this first cause, containing no contingency whatsoever, must remain active in creation to preserve it from nothingness.
However, the previous demonstrations, while progressively moving towards the God of Scripture—whose existence is both transcendent from and immanent to creation—still lack the dimension of the Creator’s intimacy affirmed in Scripture as well as in the lives of the faithful. With regard to the Second Way, while creaturely effects must resemble their divine cause, there is no sense of the manner in which that likeness exists. With regard to the Third Way, while God’s existence is necessary to preserve creation, there is no sense that this presence exists personally or with any intentional intimacy towards creatures. The Fourth Way now steps implicitly in this direction. In this demonstration, God’s existence is derived, not merely by virtue of the existence of effects, but by the specific resemblance of the effects to their Cause as well as by the relationships of the effects to each other.
Beginning, of course, with the world of sense, Aquinas observes that
[a]mong beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble, and the like. But “more” and “less” are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum.
Aquinas employs the principle that the maximum in any genus is the cause of every member of the genus,30 and he concludes there must be something which is the cause of all perfections as well as of all being, “and this we call God.”
Aquinas reaches this conclusion by assuming that if there is a maximum for every perfection (goodness, truth, and so forth), then there is also a maximum for being. In fact, being is associated with perfection, following Aristotle’s Metaphysics (ii): “those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being.” However, Aquinas does not explicitly include—but rather assumes—the fact that being, while considered a perfection, cannot be a genus in the proper sense of the word, because being is common to all genera, and consequently inclusive of every created thing. In order for something to belong to a genus, it must first exist. In this sense, being holds priority over any given perfection. On the other hand, since being is a perfection common to all genera, it may be used as the criterion with which to compare and contrast them; in other words, among beings there is more or less being with regard to their respective genus or species. Thus, Aquinas implicates two different measures in the created world: that among creatures of the same kind and that between creatures of different kinds. These two measures’ relation to the maximum of being, the cause of all, is important in imaging the Creator.
Aquinas’ modification lies between the maximum of being (which implies God) and the maximum of each particular genus. Since the maximum of being is the cause of all being—and hence all genera—then the maximum must, in this case alone, be the cause of its own existence. Since no created thing can be the cause of its own existence (or its essence would be its own existence) then the maximum of being cannot be compared to or contrasted with anything that it causes. By organizing his metaphysics of participation around the principle that the maximum of a genus is the cause of all in that genus and by further including being among perfections—in fact giving it priority of perfections—Aquinas lays the groundwork for speaking about a Creator who is distinct, yet whose effects exist profoundly in relation to it.
The entity who causes all being is not only excluded from every genus but is outside of all genera, and therefore is uniquely “outside” of the world (Question 3 will make explicit), for we define things in the world by categorizing them into their genus, species, and finally, their individual qualities. The implications of this conclusion are critical to the negative theology of both Aquinas and Eckhart, because this prohibits God from being spoken of as any type of being at all: the one who causes all being is not being itself nor any particular being, and cannot be placed within any of the categories by which everything in our world is described. Therefore, God is ineffable.
On the other hand, precisely because this God—and no other—causes all being, all things have an immediate relation to its Creator, as well as to each other; each thing is related to all other things by what they share: being. Being, or existence, is the most immediate and intimate thing that can be said about something—something has first to be (even if only in the imagination) before it can be any particular thing. Yet, to be a creature at all, its existence must be inseparable from its particularity: in creating, God causes something to be this and not that. In this sense, God’s very incomprehensibility, that which distinguishes God from the world and allows God to be the cause of all, is the very source of the intelligibility of creatures, and it is the particularity of the creature which relates it not only to other created things but to its Creator as well. Therefore, the creature is a reflection of its Creator, not only in itself, but in its relationship to others.
What the Fourth Way adds to previous demonstrations is how creatures resemble God in their particular relationships to each other. This allows Aquinas to move forward in demonstrating the existence of the God of Scripture. Presently, in Question 3, Aquinas will further develop the implications of God’s exclusion from every genus. Specifically, he will explore the issue of the difference between the Creator’s essence and that of the creature (God’s essence and existence are identical while the creature’s essence and existence are not),31 effectively eliminating any possibility of God’s belonging to any genus or species. However, central to his explication, Aquinas must show God not only as the immediate and immanent Creator—causing and continually sustaining creation—but also as the intimate and personal Creator, whose creatures reflect and return to their ultimate Source. The Fifth Way will complete the plan by showing that God intentionally creates the world such that their end is that same source.
As noted above, all creatures resemble other creatures in their genus in relation to the maximum of that genus; Aquinas uses the example of particular perfections such as “good” and “noble,” which are said to be more or less in relation to a most good or most noble. Thus we can describe something by comparing and contrasting it with other things of the same genus. Furthermore, while all creatures can be compared and contrasted to others of their own kind, one kind can also be compared with and contrasted from another by virtue of their order of being: for example, with regard to existence a fern is more noble than a rock, a horse more noble than a fern, a human more noble than a horse, and an angel more noble than a human. This reflects the standard Neoplatonic hierarchy of being. The Neoplatonic hierarchy, however, lacks the resources to separate creation from its Creator. In this schema, then, it could be said that creatures possess their existence and all the perfections it entails in proportion to their Creator. But we know that Aquinas rejects this position: creatures have no proportion to the Creator. Even less should it be said that any creature, no matter how noble its existence, is like the Creator, because that could very well lead to the misapprehension that there is a proportion between the two.
The Fourth Way distinguishes the Creator from all else by incorporating efficient causality (that is, the Creator is the maximum of being, the cause of all perfection and of all genus), effectively removing God from the world of comparisons and contrasts and eliminating the possibility that any creature—or any genus—enjoys a relationship of proportion to the Creator. But, with the same move, since all things are related to each other by their common feature of existence, not only the very multiplicity, but the hierarchy of creation reflects the Creator. According to Rudi Te Velde,
The diversity of creatures is not a sheer multiplicity, but must be understood to proceed from a common origin as it is a diversity within the unity of an order. One creature would not suffice to represent the abundant goodness of God. This diversity requires an inequality among its parts, implying a diversity of grades of perfection. There can never be an adequate likeness of God if all things are of the same degree.32
The order of creation, not merely creation’s existence as effects, demonstrates God’s existence. But even this demonstration does not yet fulfill the requirements of Scripture’s Creator which includes God’s intentionality towards creation. For the faithful, not only is God the fullness of Goodness, Truth, and all such perfection, but above all, God is “Love”; and love is a personal gift given in absolute freedom. A God whose creation is only a natural “by-product” of its existence is not meaningful to the believer. For God to be the God of Scripture, the act of creating must be intentional and purposeful—and personal. For human creatures, this purpose is finding their end in their Creator, ultimately for reunion and for communion. Thus, when the God of Genesis professes the creation of the world “good,” this affirmation expresses more than an emanation or effusion of the Creator’s own goodness into creation; it expresses an intentional and personal act of the Creator’s self-communication and self-sharing with the creature, which can only be described as an act of divine Love. Not only does the order of creation reflect the perfection and existence of the Creator, but it also reflects the love of the Creator for creation: God’s free and personal self-communication manifest in all of creation.33
The Fifth Way accomplishes this last step, though quite implicitly at this point in the treatise, demonstrating a God whose creative operation is intentional rather than natural, and whose effects reflect their cause by virtue of the end to which they are purposefully designed. Aquinas argues that even things lacking intelligence act for their proper end, which in effect means reaching their full potential with regard to their particular place in the order of being. “Now whatever lacks intelligence cannot move towards an end, unless it be directed by some being endowed with knowledge and intelligence. … Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God.”
This argument “from the governance of the world,” is often called the teleological argument, referring to the inbuilt purpose something reaches after its existence fully unfolds, for example an acorn becoming a tree.34 While Aquinas reaches to the lowest common element—those things lacking intelligence—his aim is obviously drawn much higher on the scale of being, specifically humanity, whose teleology is communion with God. This is clear not only from the beginning of the question of God’s existence, where Aquinas replies that knowledge of God’s existence is implanted in us (if only in a “general and confused way”) because “God is man’s beatitude,” but also from his introduction to the questions on God’s existence and nature: the mission of sacred doctrine is to teach the knowledge of God, “as He is the beginning of things and their last end, and especially of rational creatures.” The Fifth Way comes full circle by demonstrating God whose existence we are considering is none other than the Creator who draws all things towards their intended end and, as Aquinas will further indicate, who ceaselessly coaxes the human creature into communion with its Ground and Source.
Thus, while the Five Ways may perhaps fall somewhat short of proving the existence of God from a purely philosophical perspective, careful examination from the “radically theological” perspective Aquinas intends does demonstrate that, in order for God to be “God,” God must exist as uniquely distinct: transcendent (distinguished from the world) yet immanent (related to the world as cause); and further, in order for God to be the Creator God of Scripture, God also exists intimately related and personally present to creatures (as their ultimate source and end).
Preller points out that even philosophically speaking the Five Ways succeed, at least in establishing the parameters around which we may inquire about God:
To ask if God exists is to ask if a new kind of reference is possible—if there is a use of “exist” other than that defined by the sorts of references we find ourselves making to things of which we can naturally conceive. … [W]e want to define a kind of logical space (however unique or peculiar) which can be intended on the basis of our references to the world. Thus, Aquinas defines “God” not merely as “above all things and removed from all things,” but also as the “cause of all things.”35
Preller perceives that the theological motivation for creating this unique kind of logical space removing “God” from the range of our conceptual powers is emphasizing our natural inability to “conform our minds to God” without God’s grace.36 In other words, the Scriptural imperative demands that not only God’s distinction from the world, but God’s incomprehensibility be preserved. This is at the heart of what it means to be a human creature in relation to the Creator, whose gratuitous self-communication is the only means by which the human may accomplish its intended end. Furthermore, if the Five Ways do create such a “logical space” for speaking about God, then (contrary to Preller’s initial claim)37 Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God are neither dangerous nor irrelevant to his doctrine; indeed, they are essential to understanding Aquinas’ metaphysics as driven by theological and linguistic concerns. This hypothesis is further supported by the allusion to naming God that closes each of the Five Ways.38
The conclusion to the proofs reveals yet another correlation with the following questions: Questions 3-11 treat the “formal features” of God’s existence—that is, God’s essence or the manner of God’s existence—and Questions 12 and 13 consider how God is known and named by human creatures. This fits well with Hankey’s suggestion that the Five Ways, taken together as one organic proof and in conjunction with the first question, provide a plan for what follows.39 Specifically, Hankey sees in this plan the exitus/reditus dialectic, where “the movement of knowledge coming down from God’s self-disclosure mediated to us through Scripture [Question 1] meets the movement of thought rising from the scientific understanding of natural phenomena and reaching up towards God [Question 2].”40 The questions on God’s essence, beginning with God’s existence, are complemented by the questions of how human creatures know God, through the senses, and of how we speak about God, which embraces this dialectical movement—and ultimately overcomes it, allowing speech about God to retain its thoroughly negative character.
Finally, the “unique logical space” created by Question 2, allowing us to inquire about God while maintaining God’s incomprehensibility, is not only conducive to a non-contrastive grasp of language, but goes beyond this possibility precisely because it suggests the “reditus” part of the dialectic: the creature’s return to God, and the movement made possible because of this inbuilt telos. While not apparent within the Five Ways themselves, this especially relates to the human creature, who images its Creator, at least in part, by its participation in the perfection of intellect; the second question implicates the centrality of the human creature’s relation to God, since it is because of our intellect that we seek to inquire after God in the first place—and require the kind of “demonstrations” Aquinas provides with the Five Ways. By following through with the implications raised by Question 2—that is, the requirements of existing as God (transcendent-yet-immanent: causing and sustaining creatures as well as intentionally and intimately bringing them into relation)—the Scriptural narrative begins to come into focus. Questions 3-11 utilize the unique logical space opened up in Question 2 by drawing out the features of the Creator God of Scripture in such a way that the Creator’s incomprehensibility is preserved. Questions 12 and 13 then connect this Creator specifically to the human creature who seeks to know and to articulate, however inadequately, its ultimate Source and End.
The Simplicity of God (Question 3)
The Perfection of God (Questions 4-6)
The Limitlessness of God (Questions 7-8)
The Immutability of God (Questions 9-10)
The Unity of God (Question 11)
Question 3 introduces us to the manner of the Creator’s existence. Aquinas outlines this section by repeating Dionysius’ warning for a third time:
because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not. Therefore we must consider 1) How He is not; 2) How He is known by us; 3) How He is named. Now it can be shown how God is not, by denying of Him whatever is opposed to the idea of Him—viz., composition, motion, and the like.
Aquinas’ aim here is to draw an intimate connection between knowing God and speaking about God, but not before the correct order of the relationship between Creator (the One spoken about) and the creature (the speaker) is firmly embedded in the minds of his readers. To appropriately grasp this relationship, Aquinas examines certain features said to be unique to the Divine, thereby setting God apart from all else. Such “formal features”41 are attributed to the Creator alone: simplicity, oneness or unity, perfection,42 limitlessness (infinity), and immutability (eternity). Not only do these features establish the Creator’s distinction from creation, they give the believer a specific vocabulary with which to speak to and about God, especially as Creator and in relation to creatures. These formal features certainly deny any and all creaturely attributes; however, what Aquinas does not yet reveal is that this negative interpretation must at the same time encompass every creaturely attribute so God is articulated as the Creator of all—in other words, this negation must be understood non-contrastively.
We have already seen that Aquinas follows Dionysius: it is better to compare God to the lowest existing thing than to risk understanding God as the most noble of creatures, for “what God is not is clearer to us than what [God] is.”43 However, Aquinas is also indebted to the medieval Jewish theologian Moses Maimonides for his negative theology. Like Aquinas, Maimonides is primarily concerned with safeguarding God’s distinction from all created beings. Maimonides observes that due to the highly metaphorical language of Scripture the average believer inevitably falls into the error of anthropomorphism when speaking about God, thus compromising God’s absolute unity from which this distinction is derived; for biblical language often describes God in terms making God appear to be composed like other creatures. Because of the danger associated with this type of language, Maimonides believes most faithful must be instructed “parrot-wise” that the difference between the Creator and creatures is not one of degree, but of kind: God is one, eternal, and incorporeal, all of which exemplify God’s ultimate perfection.44
Although Scripture is replete with anthropomorphisms and other metaphors, Maimonides maintains it does truly reveal God’s essence, particularly in Exodus where the divine name is given to Moses: “I am who am.” In this one divine name, all attributes distinguishing the Creator from creatures are contained. Although the masses must unquestionably accept such divine attributes (or formal features) above all other descriptions of God so to counter their tendency to understand God anthropomorphically, a few will strive for a higher stage of speculation wherein conclusions of God’s distinction can be reached philosophically. Maimonides, too, brings philosophical reflection on the nature of God to bear on his religious tradition. Maimonides perceives that metaphysics must be used to articulate the distinction of Creator from creatures and also to preserve God’s incomprehensibility; therefore anything said about God, even philosophically, must be interpreted negatively.
For Maimonides, everything except completely equivocal usage must be ruled out when applying essential attributes to God. That is, any attribute applied to God’s essence—even existence or unity—must be understood as a negation of any creaturely notion of the term, since any positive assertion made in creaturely terms implies multiplicity or composition.45 Positive assertions having a negative prefix, like immortality or incorruptibility, affirm a privation of some creaturely attribute, and so are essentially negative in form.46 However, Maimonides had to contend with Scriptural language, which also makes positive assertions about the “living,” “powerful,” and “knowing” God; and this attribution goes beyond merely describing actions of God to attributing something to God’s essence.47
How is it that such positive assertions about God can be understood completely equivocally and simultaneously affirm the Creator God of faith? Maimonides’ answer goes further than simple negation of Divine attributes, but includes the proper ordering of that negation. As Harry Austryn Wolfson observes, Maimonides’ ordering of divine attributes shows how—when taken as the negation of their opposites—such propositions constitute a complete description of the dissimilarity between Creator and creatures, safeguarding God’s absolute unity and unique distinction:48
God is Existent (“I Am Who Am”) = God is not contingent49
Negates the similarity between the Creator’s necessary existence and creatures’ accidental, possible, and transient existence
God is Living = God is not dead 50
Distinguishes the Creator from the sublunar elements (inanimate/dead bodies)
God is pure form = God is not corporeal 51
Distinguishes the Creator from the celestial spheres and living corporeal beings
God is first = God is not caused
Distinguishes the Creator from incorporeal caused beings (intelligences, angels)
God is powerful = God is not weak
Distinguishes the Creator’s ultimate and primary causality from the creature’s limited and secondary causality
God is knowing = God is not foolish
Distinguishes the Creator’s wisdom from the creature’s knowledge; the Creator is not a blind force acting by necessity and unconscious of results produced
God is willing = God is not rash or neglectful
Distinguishes the Creator’s intentional and free action from the creature’s rash and often neglectful action
God is One = God is not many (in number or in composition)
All negations summed up, thus safeguarding the Creator’s absolute unity and distinction from creation. God is excluded from any creaturely category whatsoever
Notice the first proposition presents the thesis of the negation: The Creator’s existence is unlike the existence of anything else. The next three propositions show the distinction of this existence by moving God out of the created order of being: inanimate and animate corporeal things as well as incorporeal things. The second set of three propositions shows how God’s perfect action is unlike human action: without God’s creative act there would be no other; this primordial creating is neither necessary nor accidental, but fully gratuitous and intentional. The last proposition reaffirms the singular uniqueness of God’s existence. Excluded from all creaturely categories, the Creator in no way essentially participates in the order of creation. But Maimonides’ negation—in keeping with a purely equivocal interpretation—goes beyond excluding God from all creaturely categories; Maimonides also qualifies that propositions of Divine attributes must be negated, and further, the terms themselves must be negated in their ordinary sense.52 For instance, not only does “God is powerful” mean “God is not weak” but also that Divine power is totally equivocal to creaturely power: God is not weak and God’s power is unlike creaturely power.
Not incidentally, for Aquinas, both the order of essential attributes and the negation of these attributes in their ordinary sense play a critical role in his negative theology developed throughout Questions 3-11. In the end, Question 11 on God’s unity actually reaffirms God’s simplicity, treated in Question 3, as well as summarizes God’s perfection and other formal features examined in Questions 7-10. Furthermore, within these questions Aquinas strives to show precisely how these essential attributes are not to be understood in their ordinary creaturely sense. Therefore, in light of Maimonides’ qualifications regarding affirmative forms of Divine attribution, Aquinas’ treatment of the manner of the Creator’s existence may be interpreted as thoroughly negative.
On the other hand, Aquinas proposes a “middle way” in Question 13 between an equivocal and an univocal understanding of the Creator–creature relationship, which would seem to compromise a truly negative theology. Maimonides rejects any such position between equivocal and univocal uses referring to Divine essence because this would inevitably imply a third likeness between the Creator and creature, endangering the Creator’s distinction from creation.53 Although both Maimonides and Aquinas are primarily concerned with preserving this distinction, Aquinas—by virtue of his religious vocation dedicated to orienting the faithful towards their beatific salvation—recognizes he must be able to articulate this distinction not only in terms of the Creator’s transcendence from creation, but by the Creator’s immanence to it as well.
This is not to say that Maimonides was uncommitted to this saving goal, for he was first and foremost a Rabbi before a philosopher; but his perspective on ordinary believers’ ability to understand Scripture’s metaphorical nuances was considerably less optimistic than Aquinas’. It is abundantly clear from the first page of his Summa that Aquinas actually counted on ordinary believers’ desire and potential to become skilled in discerning biblical prose. Question 1 asserts that while it is impossible for us to come to know God through rational thought, aided by faith’s guidance as well as inbuilt telos, our natural penchant for intellection is a vital part of our return to God who is beyond intellection altogether. This intimate union has little meaning if we can only speak about a God who is transcendent. The force of Aquinas’ philosophical labor is aimed at articulating the God of Scripture, whose distinction, as illustrated by Question 2, depends just as much on the Creator’s immanence to creatures as it does on the Creator’s transcendence from creatures—and our ability to become aware and build upon this awareness through our religious expressions.
Having set up this condition in Question 2, Aquinas attempts to show how this relationship of transcendence-in-immanence can be articulated such that God’s incomprehensibility is respected, and—as Dionysius and Maimonides demonstrate—this can only be accomplished by adhering to the demands of a thoroughly negative theology. Aquinas’ strategy, developed implicitly throughout the preceding questions and discussed explicitly in Question 13, must fall clearly within the confines of negative theology. As with Maimonides, the ordering of the formal features in these questions is crucial, but Aquinas shows his ordering constitutes a complete description of the dissimilarity between the Creator and creature while revealing the immediate, intimate, and necessary presence of the Creator to creature. Since this immanence totally exceeds any creaturely presence, speaking of the likeness of creature to Creator articulates a thoroughly distinct relationship. Seen in this light, analogical language-use retains its negative character. Nothing said about God’s essence, even terms also attributed to creatures, such as goodness or perfection, may be understood in its ordinary sense.
Using ordinary words in an extraordinary way to refer to the divine requires a non-contrastive grasp of language. Even terms not commonly used to refer to creatures, such as limitlessness and immutability, imply the negation or limitation of some creaturely attribute, so nothing said about God is exempt from the tendency to compare or contrast the Creator and creature. But as Aquinas has already established in his second question, to call God the Creator is to move God out of every possible category by which proper comparison or contrast may be made, thereby uniquely situating God as Cause and Measure of all things falling within the order of creation. Aquinas now explicates this divine position by progressively demonstrating how special terms used to talk about the Creator’s transcendence from the created order necessarily indicate the Creator’s immediate and intimate presence.
Question 3 confirms and expands upon how God is completely outside of the created order and subtly raises the question of how, if this is the case, God can be immediately present to it. Article 7 gives a concise summary of God’s unique transcendence:
there is neither composition of quantitative parts in God, since He is not a body; nor composition of form and matter nor does His nature differ from His suppositum nor His essence from His existence; neither is there in Him composition of genus and difference, nor of subject and accident. Therefore, it is clear that God is nowise composite, but is altogether simple. … Secondly, because every composite is posterior to its component parts, and is dependent on them; but God is the first being …. Thirdly, because every composite has a cause. … Fourthly, because in every composite there must be potentiality and actuality; but this does not apply to God. … Thus in every composite there is something which is not it itself.54
The first article appeals to both scriptural and philosophical arguments. All five objections raised refer to passages in Scripture referring to God in corporeal terms. Recalling Question 1’s conclusions about scriptural language, Aquinas responds that these texts are meant to be taken metaphorically, and such bodily terms refer literally to God’s power and incomprehensibility.55 Therefore, corporeal terms are not taken in their ordinary sense when used of God. Aquinas also takes this opportunity to restate the distinction he made in the First Way between potency and act, creating a basis for removing the Creator from all creaturely categories and establishing the Creator as primary cause. Anything corporeal contains some potency and must be moved to actuality by something already in act, but since God is pure act, not only is God incorporeal but He is the cause of bringing all potential things into actuality. Article 2 further qualifies God’s incorporeality by distinguishing it from any type of form which participates in matter. Article 3 concludes that God’s essence is, therefore, God’s individual and full definition: “Since God then is not composed of matter and form, He must be … His own Life, and whatever else is thus predicated of Him.”56 Articles 4 and 5 make this explicit: “God is not only His own essence, as shown in the preceding article, but also His own existence.”57 The identification of God’s essence and existence removes the Creator from creatures by the very way we define ourselves, that is, by the categories of genus and species in which we participate, necessitating a separation between our essence and our existence. We must say the Creator is outside of creation, and further, the Creator is outside of all creaturely definitions—essentially preserving God’s ultimate incomprehensibility.
Article 5 seals the Creator’s complete transcendence from creatures. The Creator is outside of all genus and species, and simultaneously the measure of all genus and species. This measure is in no way proportionate, because a proportionate measure must be homogeneous with what is measured. So, “measure” is not used in its ordinary sense when referring to the Creator. Rather, Aquinas says, “He is called the measure of all things, in the sense that everything has being only according as it resembles Him.”58 This calls attention back to Aquinas’ development of divine causality in the Five Ways: it is by virtue of God’s causing and sustaining all things in being—moving them from potency (nothingness) to act—that any likeness or measure is possible at all. Moreover, this likeness or measure is much more profound than resemblance; it manifests the Creator’s presence and immediacy to creatures. Therefore, the Creator’s complete transcendence from the created order also allows for the Creator’s immanence.
Articles 6 and 8 implicitly raise the question of how the Creator is present to creation. Objection 1 foreshadows Aquinas’ treatment of God’s perfection as well as the notion of analogy by asserting there must be accidents in God because “wisdom, virtue, and the like, which are accidents in us, are attributes of God.” Aquinas replies that these are not predicated of God and of us univocally. Therefore, we may conclude, these perfections are not used in their ordinary sense when referring to God. Since we do not share in God’s perfection in an univocal way, can we then say that God is present to us by entering into the composition of things? Question 8 refutes this understanding as well, following Dionysius, that union with God does not imply co-mingling.59 The Creator’s immediate presence to creation, as well as a creature’s ultimate communion with God, does not compromise the Creator’s distinction, because the Creator is the first efficient cause, which does not participate in the form or matter of the thing caused. The Creator’s presence to creation, therefore, must be an altogether unique kind of presence. In Question 3 Aquinas accomplishes what Maimonides did by providing a complete description of how the Creator transcends creation, but goes well beyond Maimonides by pointing towards the issue of the Creator’s immanence to creation.
Questions 4-6, on God’s perfection and goodness, re-orient the question of the Creator’s presence so that all divine formal features may be understood non-contrastively. These three questions together form a unit, for goodness is considered the primary perfection: “because everything in so far as it is perfect is called good.”60 However, viewed together with the other questions concerning the manner of God’s existence, those on God’s perfection and goodness do not seem to fit with the notion of formal feature; since we attribute limitlessness, immutability, and the like only to God and not to created things, we do attribute various perfections to creation—indeed, we especially speak of the creature’s goodness in terms of its relation to the divine goodness. If anything, perfections such as goodness seem to permit an univocal understanding of the Creator–creature relationship—contrary to Aquinas’ assertion that anything attributed to creatures must be denied in God—precisely because in accordance with Scripture creation participates in God’s goodness by virtue of the divine creative act.
On the other hand, consideration of God’s perfection and goodness flows directly from Question 3, where God’s simplicity is based on the singular identification between God’s essence and existence which sets God apart from the world and establishes God as Creator. The notion of causal participation—an articulation of the Creator–creature relationship wherein the creature is said to share in the Creator’s perfection—rests upon the Creator’s exclusion from all creaturely categories. Only by being excluded from every possible genus and species can the Creator be intimately present to everything contained in them (which will be the topic of Questions 7-10). Questions 4-6 reveal that all such God-talk is really about the Creator’s immanence to creatures, rather than about the Creator’s transcendence from creatures. This redirects our understanding of the formal features under consideration: when we speak of God’s eternity or infinity, for instance, we are not saying how far God exceeds us in time or space, but rather how intimately close God must be to us! We should not underestimate the importance of these three questions to the rest of the section, as well as to a non-contrastive understanding of God-talk, because they go far beyond comparison or contrast, and—as we will see in Question 13—well beyond univocal or equivocal predication; this is the core of Aquinas’ notion of “analogy”.
Questions 4, 5, and 6 establish non-contrastive usage by eliminating univocal understandings of the Creator’s perfection and the creature’s, and by qualifying non-univocal usage through reversals and extensions, aimed ultimately at affirming the scriptural declaration that we are made in God’s image and likeness. Question 4 begins by reversing the creaturely meaning of perfection when attributed to God. For creatures, perfection lies in the way they are made, including their place in the order of creation: a living tree is more perfect than a rock which merely exists; a full-grown tree is more perfect than its seed, which is only in its beginning stage. According to this defining, the Creator cannot be considered perfect, for the Creator’s essence is existence (the lowest level on the order of creation) and the Creator is the beginning of things (which is less perfect than the end). Aquinas completely reverses the definition of perfection when attributed to the Creator:
“[God’s] existence is the most perfect of all things, for it is compared to all things as that by which they are made actual; for nothing has actuality except so far as it exists. Hence existence is that which actuates all things.”61
From the perspective of creation, existence has the lowest status, requiring nothing else to reach its perfection, but from the divine perspective, existence has the highest status because without it there is nothing to be perfected. Furthermore, while in creatures the beginning necessitates potentiality—that is how it is directed to its perfect end—the Creator as beginning of all things necessitates a complete lack of potentiality, and is for that reason the end that all things seek. The Creator may only be improperly called perfect, since our creaturely understanding of perfection rests on a notion of initial incompleteness and possible non-existence.62 This reversal invalidates an univocal understanding of perfection between Creator and creature, and moves into the equivocal, by negating the meaning of creaturely perfection when it is applied to the divine.
However, Aquinas is not finished. Article 3 turns its focus from Creator to creature, not only anticipating the scriptural imperative of creation’s goodness which underlies Question 6, but revealing Aquinas’ true aim—the Creator–creature relationship and articulating it without violating the Creator’s incomprehensibility. Having established the Creator’s perfection as altogether different criteria-wise from that of the creature, the question is posed, “can any creature be like God?” Here Aquinas also shifts from reversing our understanding of perfection when applied to the Creator to extending our usage of creaturely terms; and, in a final step, he will take this extension beyond itself.
Aquinas sets up this extension, as he did with the previous reversal, by rejecting a univocal understanding of “likeness” when applied to the Creator–creature relationship. When we say two created things are “alike,” we usually mean they share some agreement in form, and hence can be compared. However, creatures share no form with the Creator, since the Creator is excluded from any category from which a form can be derived. Aquinas answers first by providing the example of efficient causality, wherein an effect may be said to be “like” its cause, not specifically, but generically, for instance as “the sun’s heat may be in some sort spoken of as like the sun.” Generic “likeness” is a far distant reproduction of the cause than one sharing the form of species, thereby providing an example of a non-univocal or, rather, an equivocal usage of the term “likeness.” This example is equivocal, not in the sense that there is no shared meaning between Creator and creature, but that an opposition between the two is created: within a single relationship, by definition, the cause is excluded from being the effect, and vice versa.63
However, extension of the creaturely term to the divine adds a priority the reversal does not; in this instance the cause is pre-eminent over the effect. Of course, this qualification is critically important to grasping the Creator–creature relationship, because the relationship does not go both ways: the cause can exist without an effect but the effect must have a cause; accordingly, all that comprises the effect comes from the cause.64 Extending this case to the Creator–creature relationship, all perfections existing in the creature it receives from the Creator, its primary and ultimate cause. Thus, the most proper meaning of “perfection” would be applied to the divine; however, when we get to Aquinas’ treatment of analogy, it will become clear that, since the understanding we have of such terms is derived from our creaturely experience, our notion of perfection can only be attributed improperly to the divine.
At this point in the exercise, the Creator is clearly distinct from the creature. At the beginning of Question 4, univocal predication of divine perfection was shown to be unacceptable because every criterion by which we attribute perfections to ourselves is nullified in God. Therefore, any such predication extending a creaturely perfection to God must be in some sense equivocal. However, this equivocally-based extension creates two problems: first—as we have discussed at length in this book—whenever the divine is opposed or contrasted with the world (just as when compared), God becomes a type of creature and cannot be incomprehensible; second, if the terms we use for us and for God have little in common save a defective or far-removed reflection of our cause, then a personal and loving Creator God is incoherent.
Aquinas now corrects these problems by moving his language-extension a step beyond itself, essentially rejecting the equivocal language-use he just took such great pains to establish. He is able to do this based on the type of unique distinction setting God apart from the world, introduced in the Five Ways and later developed in Question 3. The identification of essence and existence excludes God from worldly categories, so the Creator in no way shares any form with creation. Therefore, God cannot be opposed or contrasted to the world. According to Aquinas,
Likeness of creatures to God is not affirmed on account of agreement in form according to the formality of the same genus or species, but solely according to analogy, inasmuch as God is essential being, whereas other things are beings by participation.65
While creatures’ participation in the Creator’s existence may in some way be likened to effects to their cause, the qualification that the cause shares no form whatsoever with the effect drives the extension beyond both univocation and equivocation, because even if we were to accept the example of a generic-type of likeness, the most we could say about the likeness between God and ourselves is that it is far removed and defective. Aquinas says as much in his answer: “if there is an agent not contained in any genus, its effects will still more distantly reproduce the form of the agent.”
However, he goes on to say that “created things, so far as they are beings, are like God as the first and universal principle of all being.” As we’ll see, Aquinas’ analogy attempts to convey a likeness of creatures to their Creator more profound than any formal likeness (univocal or equivocal), because creatures actually participate in that which is more immediate than any other created thing: existence—which in itself takes no form (and yet all forms) since it is common to all.
This article draws out the implications raised in the Fourth and Fifth Ways: no one creature, no one kind of creature, can adequately reflect the Creator; however, the whole order of creation manifests the Creator in its very existence, by participation, as well as by its telos that finds consummation in becoming fully actualized—a return in fullness to the divine source from whence all things come. In Genesis, where humanity is created in the divine image, it therefore should not be understood that we bear a formal likeness to the Creator, but an existential one: our true image lies in actualizing our end (telos): communion with our source. Image in this sense is not understood as “looking like” or “resembling” God, but dynamically, in the very act of being itself.
The idea that likeness—that is, relationship—between creature and Creator is more profound and dynamic than any formal description is reinforced in Questions 5 and 6. Article 3 of Question 5 asks whether every being is good. To this, Aquinas answers, “every being, as being, is good. For all being, as being, has actuality and is in some way perfect.” Illustrating his rejection of any kind of formal extension to the Creator, which would at best be equivocal, Aquinas explains that if we are to understand the “goodness” of a creature as “looking like” the goodness of God, our articulations capture only a defective idea of the Creator’s goodness, and worse (by implication) of the goodness which inheres in the creature. Consequentially, any knowledge we could claim about God through our own goodness would imply a separation between Creator and creature, contrary to our faith. Rather, the creature’s goodness is received from the Creator, not formally, but by virtue of its ordered end. This redirects the discussion away from a definition of goodness—or any perfection—applied univocally or equivocally to God, to focus on the Creator–creature relationship, and more specifically on its goal: communion, which is not about the Creator’s transcendence from but more so about the Creator’s immediate presence to the creature. And, because the Creator can in no way properly be compared with or contrasted to creation, this presence is ultimately indefinable, pointing to divine incomprehensibility.
Questions 7-10 concern God’s incomprehensibility, because the features treated in these questions are uniquely and properly attributed to the divine and by definition excluded from creatures, in all but a metaphorical sense.66 This seems to accentuate the vast—the incomparably vast—distance between Creator and creature. But, Questions 4, 5, and 6 have prepared us to look for the Creator’s presence to creatures in whatsoever we attribute to the divine, with the qualification that this presence is like no other between creatures. Aquinas’ lesson on how perfections are attributed to the Creator and creature should make us wonder if “incomprehensibility” itself must also have a different meaning than normally ascribed.
So when we use certain terms, such as immutable, eternal, and infinite, to explain the Creator’s incomprehensibility, they should be understood to articulate the Creator’s presence to creatures, just as perfection terms do; and, they must draw attention to the uniqueness and intimacy of this presence—as well as to how Christian forms of life are to reflect and manifest it. Conventionally we use terms such as infinite, eternal, and unchanging in contrast to the way we understand creation to be set up: the vast night sky seems to go on to infinity with innumerable twinkling stars in contrast to this one insignificant, tiny planet; waiting on the results of a test that could reveal a life-threatening illness seems to take an eternity; the mountains seem to stand unchanging and immovable in contrast to the flow of seasons and passing generations. In these instances we do feel a strong sense of the divine, especially with regard to our own utter dependence on something “above” and “outside” us. But using these adjectives solely with this contrastive (or comparative) understanding to refer to God expresses only a superficial glimpse of the relationship between the creature and its Creator, emphasizing the distance and difference between the two or a proportionality between them of which the divine is far “above” and “superior.” From the perspective of faith, however, when we call God infinite or eternal we are not really referring to God’s size or age at all, but to God’s limitless, constant, and immediate love for us, eliciting a response of recognition and imitation. Thus the kind of dependence the human creature experiences is active and empowering rather than passive and invalidating, the implications of which will be explored in the last chapter of this book.
From the introductions to Question 7 and Question 8 it should be obvious that Aquinas intends to teach the use of formal features to emphasize the singular presence of the Creator to creatures. Question 7 asserts, “we must consider the divine infinity, and God’s existence in things; for God is everywhere, and in all things, inasmuch as He is boundless and infinite.” Question 8 restates this proposition, by concluding, “it evidently belongs to the infinite to be present everywhere, and in all things.” In order to make the leap from God’s infinity to God’s existence in things, however, Aquinas must reform our understanding of infinity, which, after all is said and done, depends upon our creaturely notion of finitude, rendering it not only improperly, but inappropriately attributed to the Creator.
As he did on God’s perfection, Aquinas’ first move in Question 7 is to reverse the criteria as it is conventionally used. The objections in Article 1 remind us that with created things the infinite is imperfect because it lacks form, by which a thing achieves its perfected end and makes it what it is. Having previously established God as perfect, we must conclude God cannot be infinite. Furthermore, “finite and infinite belong to quantity. But there is no quantity in God, for He is not a body.” In his answer, Aquinas reverses these requisites and anticipates his lesson on extension: first, the perfection achieved through form can only apply to matter—which contains potentiality—and as we have seen, God’s perfection is due to the lack of potentiality; therefore, this criterion does not apply. Second, infinity, when applied to God, is not a measure of some quantity (such as the space a body takes up) and therefore does not belong in the same category as the finite. This is an important qualification, because if infinity were to be categorized with the finite, then the finite might be understood to be some proportion of the infinite, allowing for comparison or contrast of the finite creature with the infinite Creator. In fact, the infinite is excluded from every creaturely category, because being categorized into genus or species requires receiving form, limiting it to being this thing or that thing.
The implications of Aquinas’ reversal are more apparent if infinity is seen in terms of limitlessness. The Creator must be limitless, contrary to creatures, who require—by the act of being created—some kind of received limit, whether it be form, matter, or, as with angels, received being. Only that which is essentially limitless (that is, self-subsisting) can create all else, including the matter out of which they are created. Consequently, “the fact that the being of God is self-subsisting, not received in any other … shows Him to be distinguished from all other beings, and all others to be apart from Him.”67 When infinity is seen as limitlessness, it cannot apply to creatures, since before receiving a limit the creature does not yet exist, except in pure potentiality. Contrary to where the question began—identifying the infinite with imperfection—infinity is related to perfection, which in turn is properly attributed to the Creator: to be perfect in the proper sense of the word means to be self-subsisting, which requires being limitless, which belongs to God alone.
Limitlessness not only preserves the distinction between Creator and creature but makes room for extending a creaturely understanding of the infinite beyond itself. In Article 1 Aquinas expands infinity’s definition to include form, something outside of the category of “quantity” on the basis of lacking a body, creating the opportunity to move the discussion towards the relationship of potency to act—which, as in previous questions, allows for non-contrastive language-use. Prior to being contracted by matter, form may, in an abstract way, be considered infinite since it is undetermined. But depending on the perspective, infinite form may be considered either imperfect or perfect. From the creatures’ perspective, infinite form is imperfect because, being undetermined, it is “formless matter”—strictly speaking nothing (no-thing). But from the perspective of limitlessness, infinite form is perfect because it is unrestricted being; it is not confined by time or space. In the following article, Aquinas extends this second notion of infinity by using an example of something lacking quantity but considered infinite: angels, who as forms without matter to limit them enjoy relative infinity; they are limited only by virtue of having received being.
Aquinas is now ready to apply an extended use to the singular case of God, which in Question 8 and those following better reveals the Creator’s unique presence to creature. Having maintained God’s distinction from created beings in the last question by virtue of God’s unlimiting self-subsistence, Question 8 asserts that, being infinite, God exists in all things and everywhere. By reminding us that God’s existence is excluded from every possible creaturely category, Aquinas moves even beyond his last extension of the infinite to unlimited form, because God is excluded even from the category of angels who, while unlimited by matter, are nonetheless contracted to a determinate nature—unlike God, angels have being but are not their own being. Extending infinity to angels, however, shows there could be an infinite entity not limited to space or time. But extending this kind of infinity to God still fails to communicate divine incomprehensibility, because it does not necessarily say anything about the relationship between the creature and the infinite being. What we want to express, according to Aquinas, is what causes us to be and to act, as confessed by Isaiah: “Lord … thou have wrought all our works in us.”68
Articulating the existence of something present in the manner of the Creator God requires another type of extension, and here Aquinas draws upon the example of an agent and its presence in its effects. While this is different from his extension of infinity to unlimited form, Aquinas has taught his reader with the last example that certain terms may be applied in an extraordinary manner when detached from conventional assumptions. Aquinas began this exercise in his Five Ways, where he drew our attention to how the god of philosophy (the unmoved mover) does not meet the criteria of the God of faith, and he began maneuvering towards the God of Scripture by introducing the relationship of potency to act—which develops the basis for his extension of perfections/formal features to the Divine, allowing creatures to participate in the Creator’s existence. In Question 8 the implications of those earlier demonstrations become clear:
God is in all things; not, indeed, as part of their essence, nor as an accident; but as an agent is present to that upon which it works. For an agent must be joined to that wherein it acts immediately, and touch it by its power … Now since God is very being by His own essence, created being must be his proper effect. … Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be, but as long as they are preserved in being. … Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it, according to its mode of being. But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect to everything found in a thing. … Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.69
Aquinas explicitly restates from the first two Ways that, unlike the unmoved mover, the God of faith creates without mediation, and unlike the first efficient cause, the Creator God must remain with the effect throughout its existence. Now Aquinas makes it clear, God is very different than conceived by philosophers or heretics; for the God of faith is in all things “by His power,” contrary to the Manichees who believe God is only responsible for creating the incorporeal, “by His presence,” contrary to those who believe God’s providential care does not extend to inferior bodies, and “by His essence,” contrary to those who believe God’s presence is not necessary for the creation and maintenance of all creatures.70
But where Aquinas held off in the Five Ways, he now renders explicit the intimate and personal consequences of God’s unique presence: the Creator is innermost present to the creature; “hence nothing is distant from Him, as if it could be without God in itself.”71 Not only is the Creator in all things, but such that there is absolutely nothing closer to the creature than the Creator’s presence, no object or being, not even the creature’s own breath. Recalling Question 2 where Aquinas asserts the human creature is inherently driven to know God,72 Question 12 will take up the Creator’s special intimacy with the human creature, who through participation enjoys the possibility of knowing its divine author in a way no other creature can, thereby fulfilling its particular telos. The third article of Question 8 anticipates Question 12 as well as future questions on the human creature’s love for the Creator and on the beatified’s communion with God.73 In his answer, Aquinas claims God’s presence as operator is proper “according as the thing known is in the one who knows, and the thing desired in the one desiring,” which is “especially in the rational creature, [who] knows and loves Him actually or habitually”; further, he mentions “another special mode of God’s existence in [the human] by union” which he treats later in the Summa.74
This union, referring to the faithful departed, is articulated in Christianity as “eternal life.” A contrastive reading leads us to interpret this as God’s granting the beatified unending existence, opposed to the relatively short span of time between the beginning of the human being’s existence and its inevitable creaturely end. But we want to say more about our ultimate destiny than how long (that is, interminably) we will be granted existence; we want to say something about the quality of that existence. Eternity for the beatified is the state, metaphorically speaking, of “seeing God face to face,” radically communicating the impression of equality between creature and Creator. The nature of this “equality” is the communion between the creature and its Creator, or, the identification of creature with its source.
To avoid the superficial understanding of eternity as an interminably long time, Aquinas moves his reader from this contrastive interpretation to a non-contrastive use where eternity is not the measure of time but, rather, of immutability. As with infinity, Aquinas must render immutability, and then eternity, free from any association with quantity, again by appealing to the relationship of potency to act. In his answer to Question 9, Article 1 he establishes God’s immutability on the basis of previous questions:
First … there is some first being, whom we call God; and … this first being must be pure act, without the admixture of any potentiality, for the reason that, absolutely, potentiality is posterior to act. Now everything which is in any way changed, is in some way in potentiality. Hence it is evident that it is impossible for God to be in any way changeable. … Secondly … in everything which is moved, there is some kind of composition to be found, but it has been shown that in God there is no composition, for He is altogether simple. … But since God is infinite, comprehending in Himself all the plentitude of perfection of all being, He cannot acquire anything new, nor extend Himself to anything whereto He was not extended previously. Hence movement in no way belongs to him.
Appealing to Augustine, Aquinas explains that when we speak of God in terms of movement, we speak “not … as movement and change belong to a thing existing in potentiality,” but rather of God’s operation. Aquinas illustrates this, as he did in the Third Way, in terms of God’s necessary existence and pure act: God alone creates out of nothing and preserves creation from falling back into nothingness. This operation requires no movement on the Creator’s part, since before it is created, there is strictly nothing to move or to change. What immutability really articulates, then, is the relationship of act and potency rather than the lack of movement or change.
As in his previous questions, Aquinas has reversed the criteria we might be tempted to use based on our creaturely experience, which when extended to God inevitably renders God a creature. Having removed the criteria of quantity (whatever it is to be moved or changed) from the notion of operation, we can now conceive of cases where an agent can act without motion, for example in “understanding, willing and loving.”75 Although our thoughts, emotions, and intentions are stimulated by our senses and thus require data out there in the world in order to operate, the creaturely examples of “immutable act” can extend to the singular case of God, who calls things out of pure potentiality, pure nothingness. In attributing immutability to God, Aquinas pushes the extension of immutable operation beyond mental acts to the act of creation, possible only because God’s distinct existence—as demonstrated in Question 2—requires no pre-existing data in order to actuate creative power.
Thus, immutability refers to God’s necessary, permanent, and fully actualized existence. This is much more dynamic than conceiving immutability as “unchangeability”—which inevitably limits our conception of God’s power to act, especially in terms of the created world. Like infinity, immutability refers to God’s limitlessness, but includes the notion of God’s creative operative power, a step forward in articulating God as Creator. Consistent with the pattern established in Question 2, anything attributed to the God of faith must be distinguished from the god of philosophy and direct us towards the God of Scripture, the immediate and personal Creator. We must assume this same progressive pattern with eternity in Question 10, and if this follows the Five Ways, “eternity” should turn our attention again to effects—creatures—as did the Fourth Way in implicating the order of creation and the participation of creatures in the existence of their Creator.
In order to accomplish this, Aquinas first unmasks the misconceptions of eternity as an interminably long time or the “now that stands still,” because these definitions rely on comparing and contrasting eternity with time, which is none other than the “numbering of movement by before and after”76—in other words, the measuring of change. Eternity cannot be interminable time, because time would be measured in proportion to eternity, giving the impression God is a very ancient creature who will merely outlive all things now existing. This sense of eternity must be understood only in a metaphorical sense to avoid falling into anthropomorphism. On the other hand, contrasting eternity and time also creates another difficulty, for the opposite of time is immutability, conventionally understood as the lack of motion. Following upon Question 9, however, where immutability refers not to the lack of change or movement but to the fullness of being, eternity becomes the measure of permanent being77—a status that can be extended to all things in so far as they exist, and in a special way to those human creatures who attain salvation.
This notion of eternity adds to that of immutability a space for expressing the participation of creatures in the existence of the Creator without compromising the Creator’s distinction from creation. The Creator’s existence is singularly unique because nothing else is its own duration and its own being,78 and therefore nothing brings or moves the Creator to being nor sustains it there. But, at the same time, the Creator’s existence is not opposed to that of creatures since the Creator is the author and agent of all beings and as such is absolutely necessary to them in every respect of their existence. To be opposed to creatures would mean a totally separate and disconnected existence, such as the gnostic god, dwelling in and only concerned with the transcendent incorporeal realm. As effects, creatures participate in the Creator’s existence by being actualized—by being moved (metaphorically speaking) from nothingness into being and sustained there—but the Creator does not likewise participate in the creature’s existence. So the participation of creatures in their Creator’s existence refers not to how long they exist in proportion to or measured against the Creator’s interminably long life, but to the quality of their participation in it, according to their being in the order of creation.
Questions 7-10, in addition to providing several exercises in extraordinary language extension, have also established an identification between God’s infinity, immutability, and eternity, because when severed from creaturely assumptions, each feature points to the Creator’s unique distinction from the world. Yet, with each example, the reader is pushed closer towards recognizing God of Scripture’s intimate presence and to anticipating the special place of the human creature in the existence of its source as its final end. Question 11 now completes the cycle by summarizing this identification and returning to the formal feature from whence the reader began this journey, God’s simplicity. Aquinas adds to his features that of unity or oneness. In reality, God’s oneness sums up all of God’s features:
God is one: First from His simplicity. … Now this belongs to God alone; for God Himself is His own nature. … Secondly from the infinity of His perfection. … God comprehends in Himself the whole perfection of being. … Thirdly … from the unity of the world. … For many are reduced into one order by one better than by many; because one is the per se cause of one. … [I]t must be that the first which reduces all into one order should be only one. And this one is God.79
The idea of God’s oneness exceeds, but includes, the quantity—or number—of God; it extends to the quality of this one God’s existence. Furthermore, God’s oneness illuminates the relationship of the many creatures to their one divine source: “For multitude itself would not be contained under being, unless it were in some way contained under one.”80 The unity of the world, therefore, obtains from the fullness of God’s being, and from the distinction of the Creator, who calls all things forth from nothing: “and so in being, by reason of its universality, the privation of being has its foundation in being.”81 By moving God’s oneness away from numerical or quantifiable association, Aquinas has reached the Creator God of Scripture and Tradition: “I Am Who Am,” who, far from a deity dwelling in a detached transcendent realm and wrapped up in its own self-contemplation, is the God of Moses, the One God who not only through pure existence brings us into being, but out of intimate concern leads us out of slavery into freedom—ultimately into communion and our own deification. Thus, the features that we properly attribute to the divine do not really attempt to define the manner of God’s existence, but communicate the personal and unique relationship between Creator and creature.
How God is Known by Us (Question 12)
The Names of God (Question 13)
Aquinas’ presentation of God’s formal features in Questions 3-11 clearly falls within non-contrastive language-use, because anything attributed to God’s essence must preserve God’s distinction from the world, and simultaneously articulate divine transcendence and immanence. This is what simplicity in Question 3 is qualified to do, and the other features progressively follow suit. As Sokolowski and Tanner perceive, comparing or contrasting God and the world cannot lead us to Scripture’s free, intentional, and immediately present Creator.82 Aquinas shows that some features may be utilized to avoid such comparison or contrast because they refer exclusively to God—while at the same time communicate the Creator’s intimacy to creatures and implicates creatures’ participation in the Creator’s existence. Consequently, Aquinas’ lessons on non-contrastive language not only maintain a unique distinction, but also reveal a unique relationship.
In addition to preserving God’s distinction from the world, Tanner suggests the practical role of non-contrastive language for Christianity: the purpose of Christian theology is to insure Christian forms of life are consistent with the doctrines of faith and vice versa.83 Non-contrastive language permits us to direct faith towards this end by balancing out our tendencies towards addressing a too transcendent or a too creaturely God. Directing faith and action was at the heart of the medieval Dominican mission of preaching doctrine, and Aquinas was particularly concerned that the words and deeds making up the content of Christian faith—moral theology in particular—are firmly set within the context of the doctrines of God, creation, and Jesus Christ. This means, for Aquinas, that speech about God is at the same time speech about our participation as well as our end in the divine life, brought about by Jesus Christ who through his incarnation makes this reditus journey possible. In the doctrine of Jesus Christ, asserting his full humanity and full divinity, we find the perfect expression of this balance, and further, the articulation of human and divine consummation: eternal life in its fullest sense of actualized being.
Indeed, Aquinas’ insight into how formal features reveal the uniquely intimate relationship between Creator and creature as well as its intended fulfillment goes beyond non-contrastive language. For Aquinas, speaking about God and knowing God are intrinsically connected, and knowing God is the result of the believer’s journey of faith seeking understanding. Since the knowing that results from the faith journey is not data about God but personal union—transcends all human relations—more than balancing divine transcendence and immanence is entailed; the believer must reach for the incomprehensible, an endeavor that would be futile without the capacity to recognize and respond to that which is always beyond grasp. Due to the human creature’s limited intellectual faculty, this inchoate awareness—the “restless heart”—must be developed and directed to its end by some power greater than itself. This extraordinary endowment, generally referred to as “grace,” requires its own language, and with the notion of grace we must move from balancing language to transforming it.
Recall in Question 1, Aquinas re-visions faith so that instead of being a type of revealed knowledge far exceeding the faculty of human intellection and, thus, unquestionably accepted in a leap of imagination, faith becomes the instrument—given through revelation and nurtured by tradition—wherein all human knowledge and experience is imbued with saving significance.84 In this re-visioning, grace is not merely an occasional gift given to bolster faith when it languishes, but the immediate and continual communication of God’s presence, not only in relation to a particular event or moment in time, but in everything within and outside of the life of the believer; and so faith ever-expands as the believer becomes more aware of God’s presence and providence in all things. Aquinas demonstrates this intimate relationship in Questions 3-11, and in so doing, also begins to open a linguistic space in which to discuss grace. In Question 12 on how we know God, grace becomes the determining factor in moving beyond a superficial sense of knowing God based upon visual or formal data (“knowing about”) to knowing God as union and identification with the incomprehensible. Finally, Question 13 makes explicit the role religious language-use plays in this journey: with the rising awareness of our inbuilt telos to seek after God as our own end and with the attempt to verbalize the deepening appreciation of God’s incomprehensible presence accompanying this realization, we begin to discern that the most basic principle of speaking about God is understanding that our words do not adequately capture the reality they seek to articulate. We must strive instead to speak in a way that draws attention to the uniqueness and significance of God’s presence. As believers, our ceaseless quest to express the incomprehensible leads us beyond ordinary speech, transforming—hopefully—not only the language of faith but speaker and audience as well.
Questions 3-11 began to create a linguistic space in which to speak about grace as the communication of the Creator’s presence to the human creature by demonstrating that as infinite, immutable, and eternal, God is necessarily in everything and everywhere at all times. This suggests there is never a moment or event where God’s communication—or grace—is absent. The faith journey is the believer’s maturing recognition of and response to God’s extraordinary disclosure. The difficulty is discerning and articulating God’s presence, given the restricted operation of human cognition which requires sensory data in order to process a novel experience as well as the existence of other more familiar things with which to compare it.
Question 12 addresses this difficulty by linking God’s incomprehensibility to the idea of grace and by moving towards the process of knowing as personal relationship rather than as acquiring information. The first consideration is whether it is possible to know God, since, according to Chrysostum, it is not possible for a creature to see the increatable, and from Dionysius, “neither is there sense, nor image, nor opinion, nor reason, nor knowledge of Him.”85 The remaining three objections refer to God’s infinity and existence which, so far exceeding the created intellect and excluding any proportion between the two, make God unknowable and unintelligible. All of these objections appeal to God’s incomprehensibility; however, as Aquinas’ earlier questions on God’s essence forecast, the criteria for incomprehensibility will have to be reversed in order to properly refer to the divine.
Ordinarily we speak of something as incomprehensible if it “does not make sense” or if the subject matter exceeds our education or ability. Incomprehensibility when attributed to God, however, cannot be unintelligibility because “everything is knowable according as it is actual, [and therefore] God, who is pure act … is in Himself supremely knowable.”86 Hence, divine incomprehensibility is in reality derived from God’s inexhaustible intelligibility. But even given that the Creator could never be known well enough to be comprehended by any created being, divine incomprehensibility cannot be fully explained by a limited intellectual capacity, particularly because the inability to know the Creator would thwart the telos of the human creature for beatitude. Aquinas replies that the human, although intellectually limited, is indeed “proportioned” to know God as its ultimate cause.87 This proportioning, explicated and further qualified as analogy in the following question, makes room for God’s grace while focusing in on knowing as relationship.
Obviously the initiative for the human creature’s participation remains entirely with the Creator, who produces and sustains it throughout its faith journey, and according to Christian tradition, this is equally true with regard to its fulfillment, the granting of eternal life. However, as the Fourth and Fifth Ways of Question 2 indicate, each creature has its own particular telos according to its place in the created order as well as a correlating means of achieving its end. For the human creature, defined by its rational nature, not only the way but the goal—eternal life—involves the intellect. Aquinas reminds us of this correspondence in Question 12:
the ultimate beatitude of man consists in the use of his highest function, which is the operation of the intellect. … [Accordingly] there resides in every man a natural desire to know the cause of any effect which he sees; and thence arises wonder in men. But if the intellect of the rational creature could not reach so far as to the first cause of things, the natural desire would remain void.88
He concludes that those who reach their intended goal must know their divine source.
The following twelve articles explore the manner by which the human creature comes to know the Creator, given that the object of this intellectual pursuit transcends any comparable creaturely relation. The first and more apparent determination of this inquiry is that natural reason can grasp that the Creator, as the primordial cause of all things, is uniquely distinct from creation and consequently enjoys a relationship of transcendence-in-immanence with it; however, the nature of this existence still remains unknown.89 In order to come to a higher knowledge of God, we must have the benefit of divine revelation, allowing us to formulate this distinction in a way that not only directs us towards God as the incomprehensible Creator, but as Sanctifier and Redeemer as well. Since formulations like the doctrine of the holy Trinity and of the hypostatic union are derived from revelation proclaimed in Scripture, they have their origin in God’s grace rather than in human reason. These graced formulations are essential to religious faith because they are designed to lead believers away from the misapprehension of God as a being while further revealing the human being’s appointment in the divine life; and doctrines accomplish this by drawing attention to the singularity of the Creator God’s existence and also to the singularity of the Creator–creature relationship—particularly the Creator–human relationship. Free from misdirection, the believer’s faith ever increases as, according to Aquinas, “we know Him more fully according as many and more excellent of His effects are demonstrated to us.”90 In Christian terms, believers led by faith become open to seeing the saving significance of Christ in everything around them. Although God’s essence is still unknown, the nature of humanity’s end may be revealed.
However, having established that knowledge given through revelation assists the rational faculty by directing it towards ascertaining God as Creator, Sanctifier, and Redeemer, throughout Question 12 Aquinas continually reminds us that a set of propositions about God—natural or revealed—cannot reunite the human creature with its Creator, because it does not yield knowledge of God’s essence, wherein the knower finds ultimate fulfillment in the beatific vision. “[W]hen any created intellect sees the essence of God,” says Aquinas, “the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect.”91 This divine illumination, which raises the intellect “to such a great and sublime height” radically transforms the departed blessed, who are made “deiform—that is, like to God.”92 Rational cognition is inadequate for such an identification of creature to its Creator, because the knowledge produced, information about, stands between the knower and the object known. Neither can simply adhering to a doctrine—revealed or otherwise—produce communion; in fact, later Eckhart, following Aquinas, will go to great lengths to detach us from any formulation about God. For, in the beatific vision, knowledge between creature and Creator is unmediated and active, likened to but far exceeding the personal knowing between lover and beloved.
In order to show how cognition is nevertheless involved in the journey whose end lies beyond physical death, Aquinas must first dissociate the necessary use of bodily organs from the operation of intellect, allowing the beatific vision to transcend the physical limitations of the human creature—in fact, Aquinas implicitly prepares his readers to understand terms such as “vision” and “sight” as metaphors, used improperly when attributed to knowing God. Article 2 rejects the idea that God’s essence is seen through an image by reminding us, as he did in Question 4, that there is no formal likeness—but a much more profound one—between Creator and creatures. The following two articles eliminate the use of the bodily eye in the beatific vision, and it therefore must be concluded that knowing God’s essence does not terminate in data about God. For Aquinas, the intellect is a cognitive power that is not an act of any corporeal organ but a capacity to receive God’s self-communication and a potency to respond to that recognition.93 It is in this sense we may say that human creatures are proportioned to their Creator.
At this point, Aquinas begins to distinguish between knowledge derived through the senses and unmediated knowledge. Rational cognition produces knowledge by similitude, which mediates things outside of the knower to mental images inside of the knower through the bodily senses. But there is another type of knowledge where the object is immediately present and directly united to the knower, which Aquinas later explains in his consideration of the causes and effects of beatitude.94 This knowing moves beyond verbal articulation, towards transformation, wherein it goes by another name: love. For, as Question 28 of the Prima secundae affirms, in a relationship of deep intimacy knowing and loving become inseparable, causing a dynamic communion between the participants:
Mutual indwelling is both a cognitive and an orectic effect of love. … the lover is cognitively present in the person loved in the sense that he is not satisfied with a surface knowledge of him, but strives for personal insight into everything about him, and penetrates into his very soul.95
It is love-knowledge that cleaves human creature to Creator, moving it from instinct to awareness, from inquiry to response, and ultimately—as Eckhart will even more dramatically illustrate—from rhetoric to silence.
Although Question 12 does not yet present this type of knowing in terms of love, Aquinas does begin to shift the language of knowledge from acquiring information to expressing relationship, while, of course, maintaining the Creator’s distinction and priority. Article 7 answers affirmatively the question of whether the beatified comprehend God. God cannot be comprehended in the sense of being contained in the created intellect. If, however, comprehension is not limited to the accumulation of information but is understood in the broader sense of attainment, then the blessed truly comprehend God, because “they … possess Him as present … and possessing Him, they enjoy Him as the ultimate fulfilment of desire.” This comprehension, the illumination of the human intellect which unites the creature to its Creator, does not undermine divine incomprehensibility, because it is not required that the blessed “see all in God”—this would make them indistinguishable from their Creator. Rather, in attaining to their Creator, the blessed are united as creatures whose telos is fulfilled, and to the extent they have realized their full actuality, they are deified, not infinitely, but with respect to their intended end. For Aquinas, and Eckhart as well, this special relationship is one of distinction without separation.
Having demonstrated knowing God is not only possible, but is required for human creatures in order to fulfill our destiny, Aquinas now turns to how we might articulate this ineffable reality. The heart of Question 13, how we speak about God, is analogy, standing as one of Aquinas’ more controversial presentations in the Prima pars, because—as with Eckhart’s explanation of analogy—it finds little consensus among scholars as to its interpretation or as to its consistency with his use of analogy in other works. In reality, however, Aquinas starts preparing his students for his presentation of analogy from his first question, and in Question 3 he begins a rigorous and progressive exercise in analogous language-use. By the time we have reached Question 13 the hard work on appropriating analogy has already been accomplished, and so Aquinas’ main task is to make explicit what we have been doing all along. Consequently, without the benefit of having worked through Questions 3 to 11, and without the benefit of the first two questions’ guidance, it may be difficult to grasp the subtle nuances in the explanation of analogy that Aquinas gives in Question 13.
Analogy is the extension of a term from its ordinary usage to a new context, thus revealing a similarity or relationship that may otherwise remain obscure.96 In Questions 3-11, we find a repetitive pattern of extensions, with subtle yet sophisticated twists; for the divine context that we want to ascertain is absolutely novel, and consequently there are no terms that can properly be stretched to such an extent; in fact, it is not simply a matter of how far a term can be extended, but what kind of extension is possible. As Article 1 of Question 13 expresses this dilemma: “Can we use any words to refer to God?”97 This query is echoed again at the end of the question, where he asks, “Can affirmative statements correctly be made about God?” If Aquinas is consistent with his proscription at the beginning of Question 3 that we can only know what God is not, the answer must be: terms ordinarily used to refer to creatures must be negated when extended to the divine—which seems to be counter-productive to the whole exercise, considering all we can know comes from creaturely experience, and further, we name things as we know them.98 The question becomes “Can we make such negative extensions, and if so of what use are they to us?”
In Questions 4-6 Aquinas considers the validity of extending perfection terms to God. Later, in the third article of Question 13 he reaffirms these terms are indeed more appropriately extended to the divine than are any other creaturely terms, and so may be considered literal names of God.99 Here he makes explicit that they are understood properly only when referring to the Creator and improperly when referring to creatures, thus, as Gavin Ardley reminds us, “restor[ing] theology to its right order, instead of the upside-down condition to which anthropomorphists reduce it.”100 In analogical terminology, this makes God the prime analogate in the relationship, thus preserving the priority of Creator over creature.
This qualification has already been indicated in Question 4, where Aquinas reverses the criteria of perfection when it applies to the divine, not only restoring the correct order of the relationship, but securing the distinction of Creator from creature. God’s perfection comes from being uncreated and fully actual rather than having reached a designated end, which would necessitate having a measure of potentiality. Consequently, God is the Creator from whom all things have their origin and, hence, all perfections flow from Creator to creatures. Remember in this question Aquinas maintains a non-univocal understanding of divine perfection, for the likeness of a creature to its Creator is not one of formal resemblance, and therefore we cannot compare the Creator’s perfection to creaturely perfections, confined in our rational cognition to forms. Since we can only understand these perfections from our creaturely experience of them, these terms are therefore used improperly when applied to God, although we intend them to signify a reality that exists primarily and properly in God. With this kind of extension—as long as we are aware that we are using a term improperly—we can say more than we can understand about God, thus maintaining God’s distinction and, further, “allow[ing] the genuine negative way to emerge.”101
Aquinas then moves from terms conventionally attributed to both creatures and Creator to terms attributed primarily to the Creator and only metaphorically to creatures—that is, the divine features: infinity, eternity, immutability. While the features explored in Questions 7-10 are included in the category of perfections, they present a special case because they are specifically meant to distinguish the divine from the non-divine—the uncreated from the created—and are therefore equivocal in nature. Aquinas’ task in these questions is to show divine features are not truly equivocal, but rather reveal the true intimacy of Creator to creatures.
Aquinas employs the same strategy to accomplish this as he did in the prior questions: reverse the criteria we would conventionally assign them; however, in Questions 7-10 this maneuver uncovers the misguided presumption that these features are free from creaturely conceptions to begin with, and so in addition to being reversed such criteria must also be qualified. In actuality, conventional usage of these divine features is based upon an opposition to creaturely experience: infinity to the finite; eternity to time; immutability to change. These features are, in a sense, negative extensions of creaturely terms. But such extensions are not all that useful in describing the Creator–creature relationship as professed by Scripture and Tradition. It must be qualified that the Creator, being excluded from any restrictions belonging to creaturely categories, is immediately present to creatures in a way that exceeds any and all created relationships. As we saw in Questions 7-10, far from being opposed to creaturely experience, divine features describe the Creator as the origin of all things who permeates every created being, every event, and every experience. No longer understood as equivocal, this extension does not fall within the univocal either, for the Creator still holds priority over creatures while maintaining the distinction between the two. What is gained by this extension is that now we have a means of speaking about the Creator–creature relationship which includes the necessity of the Creator’s immediate self-communication. While neither equivocal nor univocal, however, this analogous language-usage still falls within the bounds of negative theology, for we do not articulate any positive content about the Creator’s essence. As the last article of Question 13 concludes, “true affirmative propositions [such as the doctrine of the Trinity] can be formed about God”; but what we express in these propositions, as Question 12 demonstrated, is the uniqueness of God’s existence as Creator, not what God is. By opening up a linguistic space for the Creator’s self-communication—that is, religiously speaking, God’s grace—Aquinas makes negative theology much more useful than removing inappropriate conceptions from the divine, which benefits believers only by preventing them from being misdirected but gets them no closer to their source; the via negativa is in reality a step forward in the faith journey because it teaches believers to look for the ineffable not in this thing or in that, but in everything, given that all things as existing in relation to one another bear within them the inexhaustible intelligibility of their divine Creator.
But there is more to this appropriation than developing an awareness of the Creator’s immanence to creation, for the human creature’s purpose is incomplete until it responds to this presence, and is changed by it. Because of its flexibility in diverse contexts, analogy holds the most promise for plumbing the depths of this dynamic divine–human relationship. In the answer to Question 13, Article 5 Aquinas explains how analogy—properly qualified, of course—provides a way “between” the limitations of univocal language-use, which only expresses similarity among things, and equivocal language-use, which only expresses differences:
[N]ames are thus used … according as one thing is proportionate to another, thus healthy is said of medicine and animal, since medicine is the cause of health in the animal body. And in this way some things are said of God and creatures analogically. … Thus, whatever is said of God and creatures is said according to the relation of a creature to God as its principle and cause, wherein all perfections of things pre-exist excellently. Now this mode of community of idea is a mean between pure equivocation and simple univocation. For in analogies … a term which is thus used in a multiple sense signifies various proportions to some one thing; thus healthy applied to urine signifies the sign of animal health, and applied to medicine signifies the cause of the same health.
In this article, Aquinas chooses one description of analogy, the analogy of proportion, as more appropriate for naming God. However, in making the leap from the creaturely example of “health” to that of divine perfection, Aquinas assumes his prior qualifications preserving the Creator’s distinction. These qualifications are essential to his argument, because without them it is tempting to see analogy as being a form of univocal language-use or “positive” theology, neither of which is able to accomplish what Aquinas intends. The most critical qualification in Aquinas’ argument has to do with the idea of “proportion” itself, as it applies to the creature’s relation to its Creator. Recall that in Question 4 Aquinas defines proportion in its most general sense as relation, and qualifies that with regard to Creator and creatures, proportion refers to the manner in which the creature fulfills its particular telos. The human creature is proportioned to its Creator by its capacity to receive the Creator’s self-communication which engages its highest faculty, the intellect. In the most intimate human relations, the intellect embraces but moves beyond rational cognition to effect the fullest knowledge between the lover and beloved, which transforms both through a dynamic communion. In an even more profound sense, the human intellect illuminated by divine grace is directly united to the ultimate object of its desire, God, moving from knowledge to an identity of creature to Creator, thus allowing it to fulfill its intended purpose: deification.
The example of “health” Aquinas uses in Article 5 to explore how the analogy of proportion can describe a dynamic relationship whose effect is transformation without violating the distinction of the prime analogate is particularly appropriate to the Creator–human creature relationship. In this analogy, medicine gives or restores health to the presumably ailing animal. We must also presume here that the animal has the capacity to receive the medicine, and to be made better by it—that is, to respond to it. In other words, the animal must be “proportioned” or fitted to the medicine. While the animal is changed by the presence of the medicine in its body, however, there is no reciprocal change in the medicine. In applying the analogy to the divine–human relationship, “health” being the state of perfection, medicine being the Creator, and the animal being the human creature, the implications are: first, the human being has the capacity to receive the Creator (and further must receive the Creator if it has hope of being restored); second, it has the potential to respond positively to the presence of the Creator; and finally, the resulting change will be its own perfection, which is its fullest actualization. Names of God—perfections—predicated analogously, therefore, do not define divine nature, but rather describe a relationship, the implication of which is the transformation of one participant and, if taken to its logical conclusion, identification with the divine, for the fullness of perfection is existence itself, and to the extent that a creature achieves its own perfection, it shares in the divine existence wherein all perfections are one.
Finally, we must conclude that Aquinas pushes the envelope of the negative way with his development of analogy, because his “middle way,” in excluding both equivocal and univocal language, in reality sets up a “negation of negation.” Equivocation is just as unacceptable to Aquinas as univocation because, in the first place, this type of language must rely on some creaturely conception in order to be opposed to it. Second, equivocation cannot express the intimacy and immediacy of the Creator God of faith, and finally, it certainly cannot articulate the dynamism of the Creator–creature relationship.
In rejecting the limitations of this kind of negation (equivocation), not only does Aquinas take analogy well beyond its conventional usage, he lays the foundation for taking language beyond itself, for in the end, the identification that is the effect—and, as it turns out, the cause—of love-knowledge transcends the necessity of verbal expression altogether, leaving the believer open to the ineffable experience of pure presence, what Denys Turner might describe as the “silence of the apophatic.”102 And as we shall soon discover, Eckhart, free from the task given his predecessors of developing a philosophical justification and methodology for using language to this end, extends analogy further yet, wrenching those brave enough to dare from any conception that might hold them back from recognizing this profound silence, inherent in words and deeds as much as in rest. Analogy, for Eckhart and Aquinas alike, can be a means to an end as well as it is a description of it.
1 See STh, I.1.9.
2 Ibid., reply obj. 3.
3 Tanner, God and Creation, 45-6.
4 STh, I.8, obj. 2.
5 Ibid., answer, and reply obj. 1 and 2.
6 For example, while Jesus’ miracles are often read as proof of divinity, their real significance lies in associating God’s power to salvation: power to heal is the power to save. Seeing miracles as proof of divinity misses the point. In his own time, anyone intent on debunking Jesus could explain his miracles as trickery. Witness of his miracles held the real message: how he transformed the person healed and those to whom the healed proclaimed.
7 Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways: St. Thomas Aquinas’ Proofs of God’s Existence (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969); John F.X. Knasas, The Preface to Thomistic Metaphysics: A Contribution to the Neo-Thomist Debate on the Start of Metaphysics (New York: Peter Lang, 1990).
8 Kenny and Knasas analyze the Five Ways without considering Question 1. Knasas ties the Five Ways to other works of Aquinas, asserting they can only be understood as intended by Aquinas—metaphysically—in the context of previous works such as Commentary on the Sentences, De Ente et Essentia, De Princiipiis Naturae, and so on. See Knasas, The Preface to Thomistic Metaphysics, 127.
9 Leo Elders, The Philosophical Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), 83.
10 Ibid., 131.
11 Kenny, Five Ways, 1.
12 Preller, Divine Science, 108. Preller claims causal regress arguments lose a necessary sense of God’s transcendence precisely because they entail ordinary understandings of “causality.”
13 Ibid., 168.
14 Ibid., 135.
15 Hankey, God in Himself, 73 (emphasis mine).
16 STh, I.1.5, reply obj. 1.
17 STh, I.1.9.
18 Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Chaim Rabin (Cambridge: Hackett, 1995), Book I, 65-87.
19 This last phrase is included in the Fathers of the English Dominican Province translation, but not in the Blackfriar’s Latin edition.
20 See Kenny, Five Ways, 7.
21 Ibid, 23.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 40.
24 Gen 1:6 (NRSV).
25 Gen 1:27.
26 Aristotle’s “efficient cause” is reinterpreted as “cause of being,” for a creator ex nihilo could not be an Aristotelian “efficient case,” which presupposes material to work on.
27 Preller, Divine Science, 123.
28 Elders, Philosophical Theology, 128.
29 Ibid., 105.
30 Aquinas’ metaphysics of participation includes elements of Aristotle. See Elders, Philosophical Theology, 115-17. See also Kenny regarding the Platonism of the Fourth Way (Five Ways, 79).
31 Aquinas introduces this distinction in that opening of the second question. STh, I.2.1, answer.
32 Rudi Te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), 212.
33 STh, I.32.1, reply obj. 3.
34 See Elders, Philosophical Theology, 120.
35 Preller, Divine Science, 151-2. Words such as “cause” are not employed in the ordinary sense when applied to the Divine.
36 Ibid., 156.
37 Ibid., 108.
38 The first way (from motion) closes with “This everyone understands to be God”; the second way (from efficient cause) with “which everyone gives the name of God”; the third way (from necessary being) with “this all men speak of as God”; the fourth way (from perfection) with “and this we call God”; and the fifth way (from the one in whom the end of all things is directed) with “and this being we call God.”
39 Hankey, God in Himself, 73.
40 Ibid., 42.
41 See David Burrell’s use of “formal features” in his Excercises in Religious Understanding, ch. 3, “Aquinas: Articulating Transcendence,” and Analogy and Philosophical Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 129-31. See also Burrell’s Knowing the Unknowable God (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 46.
42 Perfection, however, deviates from the other formal features, but is crucial to Aquinas’ development of non-contrastive language-use.
43 STh, I.1.9, reply 3.
44 Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed, I.XXXV (p. 63 in Rabin trans.).
45 For more on Maimonides’ negative theology, see Arthur Hyman, “Maimonides on Religious Language,” in Studies in Jewish Philosophy: Collected Essays of the Academy for Jewish Philosophy, 1980-1985, ed. Norbert Samuelson (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1987); and Julius Guttman’s introduction in the Rabin translation of Guide of the Perplexed.
46 Harry Austryn Wolfson, “Maimonides on Negative Attributes,” in Essays in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy, Studies from the Publications of the American Academy for Jewish Research, ed. Arthur Hyman (New York: KTAV, 1977), 192.
47 Maimonides distinguishes between attributes of action and essential attributes. See Guide of the Perplexed, I.LII (p. 71 in Rabin trans.). Joseph Buijs, “Attributes of Action in Maimonides,” Vivarium XXVII, No. 2 (Nov. 1989), 87, believes many medieval scholars—including Aquinas—misinterpreted Maimonides.
48 Wolfson, “Maimonides on Negative Attributes,” 190-91.
49 Wolfson’s translation is “God is not missed.” However, his description better fits “not potential or contingent” because the proposition intends to point to God’s necessary existence.
50 Aquinas specifically criticizes Maimonides’ negative interpretation of “God is Living = God is not dead,” asserting this is not what ordinary Christians (or Scripture) mean by attributing Life to God. STh, I.13.2, answer.
51 Common usage is God is “incorporeal.” Wolfson uses the philosophical terminology of “form.”
52 See Wolfson, “Maimonides on Negative Attributes,” 192.
53 See David Burrell, “Aquinas’ Debt to Maimonides,” in A Straight Path: Studies in Medieval Philosophy and Culture. Essays in Honor of Arthur Hyman, ed. Ruth Link-Salinger (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of American Press, 1988).
54 STh, I.3.7, answer.
55 See, for example, STh, I.1.10, reply obj. 3.
56 STh, I.3.3, answer.
57 STh, I.3.4, answer.
58 STh, I.3.5, answer.
59 STh, I.3.8, sed contra.
60 STh, Question 4, introduction.
61 STh, I.4.1, reply 1.
62 Ibid.
63 An effect can also be a cause if it brings about another effect (for example, a mother who has a daughter who has her own daughter), but the prior effect becomes a cause, and so on—the two are still in contrast.
64 See STh, I.4.2, answer.
65 STh, I.4.3, reply 3.
66 These formal features include, scripturally speaking, God’s infinity and eternity, or, philosophically speaking, God’s limitlessness and immutability.
67 STh, I.7.1, reply 3.
68 STh, I.8.1, sed contra.
69 STh, I.8.1, answer.
70 Ibid.
71 STh, I.8.1, reply 3.
72 STh, I.2.1, reply obj. 1.
73 See, for example, Questions 1a2æ.27-8 and 1a2æ.2.8 and 3.8. See also Appendix 5 in the Blackfriars edition, “The Vision of God,” 153-5.
74 Ibid.
75 See, for example, STh, I.9.1, reply 1.
76 STh, I.10.4, answer.
77 Ibid.
78 Ibid.
79 STh, I.11.3, answer.
80 STh, I.11.1, answer.
81 STh, I.11.2, reply 1.
82 Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 32-3; Tanner, God and Creation, 28.
83 Tanner, God and Creation, 12.
84 See Marthaler, The Creed, 27-9; STh, I.1.8.
85 STh, I.12.1, obj. 1.
86 STh, I.12.1, answer.
87 STh, I.12.1, reply 4.
88 STh, I.12.1, answer.
89 STh, I.12.13, answer.
90 STh, I.12.13, reply obj. 1.
91 STh, I.12.5, answer.
92 Ibid.
93 STh, I.12.4, answer.
94 STh, Ia.2ae.2-3.
95 STh, Ia.2ae.28, 2.
96 See Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 64.
97 Emphasis mine.
98 STh, Question 13, introduction.
99 STh, I.13.3, reply obj. 1.
100 See Gavin Ardley, “From Greek Philosophy to Apophatic Theology,” Prudentia (Supplementary, 1981): 141.
101 Ibid.
102 Denys Turner, “The Art of Unknowing: Negative Theology in Late Medieval Mysticism,” Modern Theology 14, No. 4 (Oct. 1998): 479.