Dei Filius Chapter 1: God Distinct from the World, Creation, Providence and the Canons Against Pantheism

Orientation #

He picks up in the middle of the profession of faith of Dei Filius chapter one (“as regards his distinction from the world”) and refers back to “the opening address” on pantheism (prev. lecture). At the close he says chapters two, three and four — revelation and faith — are what “we’re primarily reading this for,” and the class will start with chapter two next Thursday. The Anaxagoras passage he recalls is on the verified handout “On the Natural Fragments,” p. 48 (DHB Vol. I, p. 161). The previous class opened Dei Filius and its introductory address; the next takes up belief in learning and the chapter on revelation.

The class, in order #

1. Is this as well ordered as the Summa? (“simple is the first thing to show about God”) #

Point: the attributes “one, singular, completely simple, unchangeable, spiritual substance” are grouped not by logical order but by what needed emphasis.

• Simplicity is the first thing shown about God after his existence; in the Summa Theologiae Thomas negates each kind of composition found in creatures article by article, then says universally there is no composition in God. Unchangeable is another of the five attributes of God’s substance there; “spiritual” = immaterial, which is taken up in simplicity.
• Comparison: when Thomas comments on St Paul’s moral instruction to a particular people, he asks whether Paul’s list of virtues or vices is complete, and answers that Paul’s teaching is more perfect for instructing that people, less complete as a treatise in ethics. So here the council emphasizes what is neglected in “the so-called intellectual world.”
• The document does not divide as the Summa does (substance of God, then operation, then Trinity — a needed order “in our way of knowing”); here substance comes right after will and understanding.
• The emphasis is “distinct from the world, in reality and in essence”: since he is all these things, he must be declared distinct — aimed at pantheism.

2. Pantheism and democratic customs (“the tendency of the democratic mind”) #

Point: pantheism is not the result of much thought but a thought that suggests itself from customs.

• Tocqueville: pantheism is what you must watch for in democratic religion; equality makes a God “altogether distinct and completely in control” seem undemocratic. His standing classroom example: Star Wars, “the Force be with you,” becoming part of the dark or bright side after death.
• Evidence of the tendency: in the nineteenth-century collection of the Church’s teaching (the “symbol” collection — Denzinger, inferred) Rome is always correcting German theologians, even Catholic faculties; a cardinal (he names Siri, book “Gethsemane”) pointed out pantheistic-sounding phrases in Küng (“Kuhn”) and Rahner; Einstein admits his God is pantheistic and refers to Spinoza; Hegel’s notion of God is pantheistic.
• Anaxagoras is much wiser than Einstein: he sees the greater mind as not mixed with things and gives the reason — it could not rule them if mixed with them; Einstein gives no reason, “so we figure that’s the custom.”
• Aside: scientific customs may also dispose to pantheism, since the equation makes equality the common thing.

3. Supremely happy in himself and from himself (“God alone is liberal”) #

Point: God’s beatitude does not depend on the world.

• Against “he made the world because he was lonely / wanted to express himself”: Thomas quotes Avicenna, “God alone is liberal,” because liberality gives not for a return but because it befits one to be generous; God gets nothing, and even our praise and thanks are our good more than his.
• This is the culmination of Book I of the Summa Contra Gentiles (“my favorite book”): God is supremely happy in himself and from himself.
• “Loftier than anything that exists or can be imagined” — that than which nothing greater can be thought.
• Summing up so far: the profession has been mainly about God in himself and his distinction from the world; now it turns to God as creator.

4. Why God created: by his goodness (“the end is the most fundamental of the causes”) #

Point: goodness is named first because the good is the final cause.

• Augustine: goodness is diffusive of itself; good is tied to one of the four causes, the end; so God is Alpha and Omega.
• If God acted for some good other than himself, that good would be the first cause and God would be Plato’s Demiurge.

5. Digression on “almighty” (“why do we say all mighty rather than all powerful?”) #

Point: the English words for potentia each carry only part of its sense.

• Latin omnipotens; potentia is the word of the ninth book of “wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX], actus et potentia; English has “potency,” “power,” “force.”
• “Might” alone (“I might go,” “it might rain”) carries the sense of what can be and not be — like one sense of “able.”
• Two senses of “able”: (1) ability for contradictories, able to be and not to be, divided against necessary; (2) a sense that can be said even of the necessary, since if the necessary were not able to be, it would be impossible — a real contradiction.
• Why he keeps “ability” in his own translation of Book IX: “power” is stuck on the first, active sense; we say breakable, burnable, but not “powerful” for the ability to be crushed; “might” too does not seem to be used for passive ability.
• Conclusion: “almighty power” here refers to God as cause in the sense of mover and maker.

6. Not to increase his happiness but to manifest his perfection (“on the seventh day he rested”) #

Point: the other side of “happy in himself”: he did not create to gain or increase happiness.

• Scripture read this way: God rested from all he had done — happy in himself, not from what he made.
• Contrast: the Marxists think man’s ultimate perfection comes from making, seeing himself in a world he has made; as if God were happy seeing himself in his products.
• “Manifest his perfection by the good things he bestows”: the connection of perfection and good again.

7. Freely, from the beginning of time, from nothing (“Is there a first day and a last day?”) #

Point: creation is free, has a temporal beginning known by faith, and is from nothing.

• Free plan: Thomas spends much of SCG Book II on creation as a free act, not by natural necessity — Spinoza’s way and the pantheists'.
• Beginning of time: known more by faith than reason. Analogy of the ultimate questions: once a father can be a son, is every father a son, or is there a father who is not a son (Adam)? So: today is after yesterday and before tomorrow — is there a day not after any day, a day not before any? Thomas argues that the arguments of reason for or against are not necessary, only inclining; Aristotle in the book on dialectical reasoning lists whether the universe is eternal among the things we would like to know — he thought it was, but perhaps did not think he knew.
• Student’s takeaway pressed by him: thank God for having chosen you — among all who could have been (your parents could have married others; the odds “looked at from the outside” in a single emission), God arranged your ancestors’ meetings back to Adam. “How gratuitous it was.”
• “In the beginning God created heaven and earth” understood as the beginning of time; from nothing means he did not start with matter.

8. Anaxagoras and the Marx–Engels division (“like leaving out the bridge”) #

Point: a division of thinkers into materialists and idealists omits the intermediate position and so blocks the road to creation.

• His “theological footnote” to the great fragment of Anaxagoras (handout p. 48): has Anaxagoras reached the divine mind or the angelic mind? His mind moves and orders matter but is not responsible for its existence — a dualistic position, so more the angelic mind.
• Marx and Engels: either matter is the beginning of all things, even mind (“mind is the highest product of matter”), or some mind is the beginning of all, even matter (St John’s prologue). As a logician: is this a good division? Student: there could be an intermediate. Anaxagoras and the Demiurge of the Timaeus (order, not being, of matter) are left out.
• Argument: (1) men start from the thought that matter is the beginning; (2) one cannot reach the truth that mind is responsible even for matter without first seeing mind as independent of matter (Anaxagoras; then Plato and Aristotle on the human mind existing after death); (3) so omitting the middle is omitting the bridge — you stay on the materialist side. “Something diabolical” in leaving it out.
• Arriving at creation by reason is “extremely difficult”; Thomas thinks Aristotle understands creation, because he has a cause even for necessary things, and in the Generation of Animals the human soul (which did not exist before the body) did not come from the parents, so not by transformation of matter — hence by what we call creation.

9. The twofold created order (“that is the theological order”) #

Point: angels, bodily world, then man is the order of theology and scripture, not of philosophy.

• Text: spiritual and bodily, angelic and earthly, then the human, common to both. Same order in the Prima Pars (angels, physical world, man) and in the psalm of the three men in the furnace.
• Thomas returns to it on the fittingness of God assuming human nature: man is a microcosm (Democritus), so God in a way assumes the whole of creation.
• Philosophical order: the angelic is the last thing known (twelfth book of wisdom); the soul is the gateway to the immaterial for reason — hence the soul is studied before wisdom, and in the first book of wisdom Aristotle points to the soul for something besides material things. The Phaedo is read in introduction to philosophy because it is about the soul, not angels; angels are more like God than the soul is.
• Asides: most people today think angels a myth; asked in class “do angels really exist?” he answered “they’re more real than you are”; his teacher Kasurik: make an act of will opening your mind to your guardian angel, no secrets from him.

10. God as ruler: providence (“art and foresight”) #

Point: God as creator is like the artist, God as ruler like the prudent man.

• The two virtues of practical reason in the Nicomachean Ethics are art and prudence; “prudence” is a transliteration, the translation is foresight; the Latin comes from providentia. In the Summa treatise on prudence, providence is an integral part — the objection being that it is the same as prudence.
• Providence is the matter of SCG Book III. The text: protects and governs, reaching end to end, ordering all things well (other translations: sweetly; student: mightily); all things naked to his eyes, even what creatures will freely do — he knows it before we do it.

11. The canons of chapter one (“let him be anathema”) #

Point: each canon condemns a nineteenth-century error, most of them Hegel’s.

• Canons are propositions; deny one and you “suffer shipwreck.” Vatican II dropped that way of speaking (John XXIII); he notes the clarity here.
• “So bold as to assert nothing besides matter”: boldness is a cause of error, Socrates always inculcates fear of being mistaken; most scientists today are materialists.
• Substance of God and of all things the same: pantheism — the Force again.
• Things emanated from the divine substance: natural necessity, as Spinoza has the world follow from God like the angle-sum follows from the triangle.
• Divine essence becoming all things by evolution: Hegel identifies the being said of all things with “I am who am” (his Logic); Thomas’s SCG I chapter that God is not the esse formale omnium — say he is and you identify God with all things. Hegel has the universal produce particulars by evolution, like the evolutionists’ matter; neither explains “how ability can give itself the act it doesn’t have.” Marx is right that he sets Hegel on his head/feet: it is matter, not the universal, evolving.
• Why the likeness tempts: genus is taken from the material in the thing; as wood can be chair, table or door by different forms, triangle can be equilateral or scalene. Ordinary speech: clay sphere moulded into a cube — “the shape changed,” though it is the clay that changed; “his condition changed from health to sickness,” though it is the body that changed. The likeness of genus to matter explains the speech.
• God as universal or indefinite being self-determining a totality: explicitly Hegel, where being first passes into its opposite, nothing, showing its indeterminacy; runs through German idealism. Marx’s satire: abstract “fruit” from apple, orange, pineapple, then evolve them back out of it.
• Not created according to whole substance out of nothing, or not freely — “as necessarily as he loves himself”: Thomas at the start of SCG I: God necessarily loves himself and, loving himself, loves other things, but not necessarily. “A very subtle thing that Thomas is doing”: “God is able not to create us” uses “able” in the metaphorical sense Aristotle distinguishes at the start of Book IX.
• Or denies the world was created for God’s glory: anathema.
• Asides: German philosophy after Hegel lives off “the decomposing corpse of Hegel,” he the universal cause of corruption; one reason for two judgments — the evil a writer does is not clear until all misled readers down the years are seen.

12. Close (“we’ll start with Chapter Two”) #

Chapters two to four, revelation and faith, are the main object; next Thursday.

His words #

• “ninth book of wisdom” — Metaphysics IX [ed.: Metaphysics Θ]; “twelfth book of wisdom” — Metaphysics XII
• “ability” — his translation of potentia, chosen because it covers active and passive [ed.: potency]
• two senses of “able” — for contradictories vs. sayable of the necessary
• “book on dialectical reasoning” — Aristotle’s Topics (inferred)
• “foresight” — his translation of prudentia, from providentia [ed.: prudence]
• “theological footnote” — his question whether Anaxagoras reaches the divine or the angelic mind
• “the bridge” — the intermediate position (mind orders but does not create matter)
• esse formale omnium — the being said of all things, which God is not
• microcosm — man as “little universe” (Democritus)
• “shipwreck” — falling under anathema

Texts #

Read in class:

• Vatican I, Dei Filius, chapter 1, profession of faith (from “distinct from the world”) and its canons
• Anaxagoras fragment on mind not mixed with things — recalled from handout “On the Natural Fragments,” p. 48 (DHB Vol. I, p. 161; verified)

Mentioned:

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia (articles on simplicity; five attributes of God’s substance; order angels–world–man; treatise on prudence, providence as integral part)
• Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I (end: God happy in himself; God not esse formale omnium; God necessarily loves himself), II (creation free), III (providence)
• Aquinas, commentary on St Paul (completeness of his lists of virtues)
• Aquinas on the eternity of the world (he says “treatise on the Trinity, the world”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, I, XII; Generation of Animals; Topics; Nicomachean Ethics (art and prudence)
• Plato, Timaeus (Demiurge); Phaedo
• Augustine (goodness diffusive of itself); Avicenna (God alone is liberal); Democritus (microcosm)
• Tocqueville; Spinoza; Einstein; Hegel’s Logic; Marx and Engels; cardinal Siri, “Gethsemane”
• Genesis 1:1; Genesis 2 (seventh day); John 1; psalm of the three men in the furnace; Apocalypse

His questions #

• Is this profession as well ordered as the Summa? No; like Paul’s letters it is ordered to what its hearers neglect — here, God’s distinction from the world.
• Spiritual means what? Immaterial.
• Goodness is tied to which of the four causes? The end.
• Why do we say almighty rather than all powerful? Left open — “that’s the word I have to study more.”
• Is there a first day and a last day, and can you know it by reason? We say yes; known by faith, reasons either way not necessary.
• Has Anaxagoras arrived at the divine mind or the angelic mind? The angelic: his mind orders matter but does not give it being.
• Is the Marx–Engels division of thinkers a good division? No; it leaves out the intermediate position and so the bridge to creation.
• When a clay sphere is moulded into a cube, what has changed, the clay or its shape? The clay; we say the shape because genus is to species as matter to form.
• Do angels really exist? “They’re more real than you are.”