God's simplicity, perfection, infinity, unchangeableness and unity: why the mind looks for one, simple, unlimited, unchanging beginning, and an overview of the question on simplicity

Orientation #

He opens by recalling “the end here last class”: the beginning of the question on the simplicity of God, where Thomas enumerates the five parts of the consideration of God’s substance (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next, but closes the first six articles and the eighth and stops at “a little break.” Text-matching identifies Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (10 min) and Summa Theologiae I, q. 3 (8 min) as the texts treated. The transcript plainly supports q. 3; it names the Contra Gentiles only in general (its different order, its fourth book “known only by faith”, its chapters on angels), never ch. 15, so treat that locus as the matcher’s, not his. The previous class worked through the third, fourth and fifth ways and began the first objection on evil; the next takes up q. 3, aa. 1-2 (God not a body, not matter and form).

The class, in order #

1. The five heads of the consideration of God’s substance (“first, we will inquire about the simplicity”) #

Point: Thomas divides what God is (or is not) into five: simplicity, perfection, infinity, immutability, unity.

• Simplicity first, “by which is removed from him composition”; perfection second and placed next to it because in bodies simple things are imperfect: plants are more perfect than inanimate things and animals than plants, but they are more composed, so simplicity and perfection do not go together in the material world, while in God they do.
• Infinity is close to perfection: not quantitative, but no limit to his perfection; not perfect in a particular kind of thing but “universally perfect, lacking in nothing.”
• Fourth, immutability (“unchangeableness, you could say in English”); fifth, unity.

2. The rule of two and three and this division into five (“most single divisions or even distinctions are into two or three”) #

Point: a five-fold division is suspect by his usual rule and needs accounting for.

• His rule: most single divisions are into two or three; a division into more is a combination of several distinctions. Example: Thomas divides being by the ten figures of predication first into three, then subdivides by two or three until he reaches ten.
• Question put: should this be done here, or is this “the exception that proves the rule” (an exception proves that something holds for the most part)?
• As far as he knows, Thomas alone divides the substance of God into these five, and does so in both Summae, with a slightly different order. “Is there something complete about this?”

3. The same names in the Greek natural philosophers on first matter (“four of these five names will be found”) #

Point: as a natural philosopher he is struck that four of the five names are said of the first matter by the Greeks, in words at least.

• Thales looked for one beginning of all things. Whether he had a reason, reason is naturally inclined that way. Heraclitus’s fragment: “listening not to me but to reason,” agree that all things are one; reason by nature looks for something one behind things.
• Aside on guesses: a guess can be reasonable because there is a reason for it, or because reason is naturally inclined that way.
• Reason also looks for order (scientists always couple “law and order”; Shakespeare defines reason as “looking before and after”), and order is based on something one: the first sense of order is temporal, and we order all events by one event, the birth of Christ, as the Mohammedans order by the hegira (Mecca to Medina); if each ordered by his own birthday we could not understand each other. An army’s order goes back to one man, a country’s to one government. In numbers, one is the beginning of all.
• Thales vs. the Bible: both start with one, but Thales (the word of man, starting from the senses) looks for one matter, since it is more obvious that things depend on matter than on a maker; the Bible (the word of God) can begin with one maker.
• Thales guesses water: something that appears homogeneous and simple to the senses, not orange juice (parts separate), milk, or red wine (a quality). Isn’t the simple before the composed, so the beginning the simplest thing? So one and simple: two of the five, “not purely by chance,” though not meaning exactly the same as in God.
• Anaximander: the beginning is the unlimited, the third word. Thomas, in the Contra Gentiles, quotes Aristotle that all the Greeks thought the beginning unlimited, and applies Aristotle’s phrase from the Physics: they say the same thing without giving a reason, “as if coerced by the truth itself.” Why: if an infinity of things comes from it with no end to coming-to-be, the beginning must be unlimited; clay can be moulded into a sphere, cube, pyramid, an infinity of shapes; water takes the shape of any container. This is a different infinity from God’s (God’s is not an ability to be formed or actualized), but still unlimited; once they saw the unlimited as they conceived it does not exist, the unlimited beginning is seen to be something different.
• Anaximander also says whatever is the beginning of things is also their end, in the sense of matter: break things down and you return to the first matter. Blocks vs. Lego: knock down the tower and you have a bag of blocks, not a Lego set; take apart the Lego rocket and you have the Lego set, not blocks. Hence the unlimited is eternal, does not grow old, remains through all change: unchangeable, the fourth word. Reason for it: if the beginning of all things were corruptible, everything could cease to be.

4. Perfect, the name that does not fit matter (“the one you don’t see here so much at all is the what perfect”) #

Point: the fifth name is the odd one out.

• Perfect does not fit matter, because matter is perfected by form, by the actuality that comes to it. So a small distinction into two: perfect vs. the other four.
• Why he stresses the natural inclination: what is shown about God’s substance can be known by faith but also by reason (it comes up in the first book of the Contra Gentiles, whereas the fourth book is what is known only by faith), so one wants to see that having these four is reasonable, the way the mind naturally inclines.

5. The mathematical physicists and Anaxagoras (“believes absolutely in the unity and simplicity of nature”) #

Point: the same four show up in the most reasonable of modern scientists, confirming a natural inclination even without a reason.

• Max Born (Nobel Prize for the meaning of the waves in wave mechanics; worked with Einstein in Berlin, their letters re-edited and sold at Borders; close to Heisenberg and Bohr; suggested to Heisenberg the “weird kind of math” at Göttingen): in The Restless Universe, the genuine physicist “believes absolutely in the unity and simplicity of nature, despite any appearance to the contrary.” This shows a natural inclination, even in the absence of reason and against appearances.
• Planck and Einstein speak of the mind’s inclination to unity; asked whether he will reduce everything to one equation, the physicist says probably not, but that is what he is trying to do.
• An equation is unlimited: force equals mass times acceleration lets you calculate an infinity of forces. The most basic laws are the conservation laws (energy, momentum, angular momentum): a kind of unchangeableness, something remaining the same through all change. So all four appear there too.
• “That’s kind of strange”: the same four names for one matter and for one mover, maker, creator.
• Anaxagoras, the Greek closest to us on the maker: a greater mind as cause of the order in natural things; one mind, unlimited, “the thinnest of all things,” having no matter and so unchangeable. Not purely equivocal or by chance that the same four words are said of first matter and first maker, though not with the same meaning.
• Aside: Schrödinger said mathematical physics perfected “the mathematics of the atom”, there is no stuff at all in the modern atom, and compared it to Plato’s Timaeus [ed.: ASR “tomatoes”] with its geometrical theory of earth, air, fire and water; no matter or motion in mathematical physics, yet the tendency to one, simple, unchangeable is there.

6. Why a beginning carries these names, and the important question (“Is ability before act”) #

Point: matter and mover are both defined as beginnings, and a beginning naturally suggests the four names; the question is whether the one beginning is matter or maker.

• Aristotle’s definitions of the four causes: matter is “that from which something comes to be, existing within it”, a beginning, an origin; the mover is “whence there is a first beginning of motion or of rest.” Form, defined as “what was to be,” does not carry “beginning” so explicitly; end seems at first the opposite of a beginning, and only the last meaning of beginning in the fifth book of wisdom makes the end a beginning.
• What characterizes a beginning: the simple is the beginning of the composed; the one of the many; if the beginning were not unchangeable everything would disappear; if it gives rise to all things it must be in some way unlimited.
• The important question: is the one, simple, unlimited, unchangeable beginning of all things one matter or one maker/creator? Since beginning means almost the same as first, before all the rest, this goes back to the ninth book of wisdom: is ability before act? If so, the first beginning is most in ability, matter; if the beginning is most in act, pure act, it is a mover or maker.

7. Simply vs. with qualification, and the answer (“what is so simply and without qualification”) #

Point: a very important distinction corresponds to a very common mistake, and the mistake is made about the greatest question of all.

• Distinction: what is so simply and without qualification vs. what is so only in some qualified, imperfect way. In the Meno (which he taught today) Meno mixes these up and Socrates’ reply makes the same mistake.
• Moral illustration: people do what is bad because in some imperfect way it is good (robbing a bank increases the money in your pocket; murdering an annoying person removes an annoyance), or omit what is good because in some way it is bad; nothing so good in this life that doing it does not prevent some other good, hence in a very diminished sense it is bad.
• Aristotle’s resolution in that book: (1) in the thing that goes from ability to act, ability comes before act, so in some way ability is before act; (2) but that thing does not give itself the act it lacks; it goes to act because of something already in act; (3) therefore simply, act is before ability; (4) therefore the very first thing is most in act, and the final answer is one maker, one creator, not one matter. And because it is act simply, the first beginning is most perfect, which does not come up in those who think the beginning is matter.
• Aside: a letter in the Houston paper against intelligent design laid down three rules of science, the first that everything must be explained by material cause; but even in generation the mover too is a cause; the writer does not understand what kind of cause matter is.
• The English word for cause is “ground,” close to the first opinion about the beginning, mother earth (“common mother thou… whose womb… teems and feeds all”, Shakespeare); materia from mater.

8. Reducing the five toward two and three: has God parts? (“why doesn’t Thomas have a question about whether God has parts”) #

Point: he tries to bring the five under his rule, mainly by joining one and simple.

• First division: perfect vs. the other four (to which the mind is naturally inclined and which fit the other kind of beginning too). Problem for “the two and three man”: one member is divided into four.
• One and simple are almost the same. Fifth book of wisdom on whole and part (axiom: the whole is more than the part): Aristotle gives about four senses each; the key distinction is composed whole (put together from its parts, not said of them individually) vs. universal whole (said of its parts, not put together from them); then three kinds of composed whole: quantitative, the definition, and matter-form. So Aristotle keeps two and three.
• Why no question whether God has parts? Classroom point: general knowledge is more useful in theology than particular; show God has no parts and you need not show he lacks two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen, two arms, two legs, two hundred pages. Water being H2O is useless for theology; whole and part is very important.
• Answer: the question on simplicity denies all composition, hence all composed wholes; showing God is one denies he is a universal whole. Father, Son, Holy Spirit is not a universal with three particulars under it: “no subject parts” (technical term). So simplicity and unity could be put together as “he has no parts.”
• Confirmations: in the commentary on the Sentences two adjacent articles say God is not a composed whole and not a universal whole; in the Compendium of Theology (written for his brother Reginald) showing God is one is a chapter within the consideration of his being simple. To be composed is in a way to be many, not one.
• His “fanatic” division into three: no parts (subdivided into composing parts and subject parts), unlimited, unchangeable. “A little forced… a little sleight of hand there.” Over-all: into two, then three, then parts subdivided.
• Alternative direct division into three: one and simple together; perfect and infinite together (infinite is especially close to perfect: Thomas will insist it is not a privation but a negation of limit, different from quantitative infinity; multiply a creature’s perfection and you never equal God); unchangeable. “A little divergent.”
• What interests him more: that four of the five are where the mind is moving without any inducement from Christianity; even unbelievers move that way. Einstein: “all scientific work of a higher order proceeds from a state of mind akin to that of religion,” convinced the universe will make sense, hence thinking like a believer that it is the product of a greater mind, though Einstein’s greater mind may be pantheistic (“the force be with you”: not too personal).

9. The eight articles of q. 3 as an inductive elimination of composition (“there are eight things to be asked”) #

Point: articles 1-6 remove each kind of composition found in creatures, article 7 gives the universal reason.

• a.1, whether God is a body; a.2, composition of form and matter. These are close, as in Met. V the quantitative whole and the matter-form composition are close, yet matter-form is left out of the key texts until Aristotle determines the truth, as if harder to see. Rubber ball vs. organs: rubber and its shape is a composition quite different from lungs, liver, pancreas, stomach; quantitative parts touch at their surfaces, but form does not touch matter by a surface; form is the very actuality of matter’s ability.
• a.3, composition of quiddity (“terrible word”: whatness, what it is, essence, nature) and subject. Socrates and “what a man is” are not the same; a distinction like matter and form but not the same as body and soul, so both are asked about.
• a.4, composition of what it is and to be (existence). The existence of a cat and what a cat is differ; so too Gabriel and his existence. Only in God are they identical. This is like matter-form insofar as it is ability and act: Thomas shows angels are not pure act because their substance is to their existence as ability to act; we are more potential than angels, since our nature itself is also composed of matter and form (ability and act). After this, in the Contra Gentiles, he has a chapter showing that matter-form and substance-existence are not the same composition.
• a.5, genus and difference: the definition, another composed whole of Met. V. Up to here the compositions are intrinsic.
• a.6, subject and accident: you and your health, your shape, your knowledge of geometry; “I’m losing some weight now, so my shape is changing… improving, they say.”
• a.7: the universal reason why there can be no composition in God. The Contra Gentiles reverses this: no composition first, then the particular kinds. So the Summa Theologiae is more inductive, “more proportioned to a beginner.”

10. Manuductio: q. 117, a. 1 on how a teacher leads (“whether one man is able to teach another”) #

Point: the order of q. 3 follows the first way a teacher leads a student.

• Last paragraph of the body: the teacher leads from things already known to unknown in two ways. First, by proposing aids or tools the understanding uses to acquire reasoned-out knowledge (scientia): less universal propositions (God not a body is less universal than God not composed, each particular composition eliminated before the universal); sensible examples, likenesses, opposites, by which the learner is “led by the hand” to the unknown truth. Second, by proposing the order of principles to conclusions, which is all Euclid does in geometry; a harder science needs the hand-leading to more universal things.
• Monsignor Dionne’s noun: manuductio; he gave courses on the manuductio required for wisdom and for logic, the sciences of greatest difficulty since they deal with immaterial things.

11. The eighth article: composition with other things (“not mixed with matter”) #

Point: a.8 asks something different, whether God enters into composition with other things.

• Anaxagoras’s fragment on mind says it is not mixed with anything, and later that it is the purest of things. At first he took these as the same thing, one grammatically affirmative, one negative, like saying God is in no way composed and then that he is the simplest of all. On second thought: “not mixed with matter” (since otherwise it could not rule matter) vs. “purest”, i.e. not itself a mixture of things: two different points (being mixed with other things vs. being yourself a mixture); and it follows “thinnest of all things,” for a mixture would have something thinner inside it.
• So articles 1-6 say there is no composition in God; a.8 says God does not enter into composition with other things, e.g. is not the soul of the world; that is why it comes last.

His words #

• wisdom, “fifth/ninth book of wisdom”: his name for Aristotle’s work [ed.: Metaphysics V, IX]
• ability / act: his rendering [ed.: potency / act]
• the rule of two and three: most single divisions or distinctions are into two or three; more means several distinctions combined
• the exception that proves the rule: an exception proves something is true for the most part
• figures of predication: the ten kinds of being [ed.: categories]
• unlimited: Anaximander’s beginning [ed.: apeiron]; also his gloss of “infinite”
• coerced by the truth itself: Aristotle’s phrase, applied by Thomas to the Greeks on the unlimited
• simply / with qualification: what is so without qualification vs. in some imperfect way
• composed whole vs. universal whole: put together from parts and not said of them vs. said of its parts and not put together from them
• subject parts: the particulars under a universal
• quiddity: “whatness, what it is, or the essence… or the nature”
• what it is and to be: essence and existence
• manuductio: Monsignor Dionne’s term for the teacher’s leading by the hand
• ground: the English word for cause, close to “mother earth”; materia from mater

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I, q. 3, prologue: the five heads (simplicity, perfection, infinity, immutability, unity) and the enumeration of the eight articles
• Thomas, ST I, q. 117, a. 1, end of the body: the two ways a teacher leads a student
• Heraclitus, fragment: “listening not to me but to reason… all things are one”
• Max Born, The Restless Universe: the genuine physicist believes absolutely in the unity and simplicity of nature
• Einstein: scientific work of a higher order proceeds from a state of mind akin to religion

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles: book I (God’s substance by reason) vs. book IV (by faith); reverse order of the treatment of composition; chapters on angels not pure act and on matter-form vs. substance-existence composition; quoting Aristotle on the Greeks and the unlimited (verified source: IV, ch. 15; not stated by him)
• Aristotle, Physics: “as if coerced by the truth itself”
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V: whole and part; senses of beginning; definitions of the four causes
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX: ability and act
• Aristotle’s division of being into ten figures of predication (as expounded by Thomas)
• Thales, Anaximander, Anaxagoras (fragment on mind)
• Plato, Meno; Plato, Timaeus (inferred; via Schrödinger)
• Thomas, Commentary on the Sentences; Compendium of Theology
• Shakespeare: reason as “looking before and after”; “common mother thou”
• Born-Einstein letters; Planck, Heisenberg, Bohr, Schrödinger
• Houston newspaper letter on intelligent design

His questions #

• Should the division into five be subdivided by two and three, or is it the exception that proves the rule? He tries two reductions (perfect vs. four, then one/simple as “no parts”; or one+simple, perfect+infinite, unchangeable), calling both a little forced; left open.
• Did Thales have a reason for one beginning, or is reason naturally inclined that way? He does not know Thales’s reason, but reason by nature looks for something one (Heraclitus) and for order, which rests on one.
• Is order more based on many or on something one? On something one: dating from Christ’s birth or the hegira, one commander, one government.
• Is it purely by chance or equivocal that the same four names are said of first matter and of God? No; not the same meaning, but not purely equivocal, since both are conceived as a beginning.
• Is the one simple unlimited unchangeable beginning one matter or one maker? One maker, because simply act is before ability (Met. IX); hence also most perfect.
• Why doesn’t Thomas have a question whether God has parts? Simplicity denies composed wholes, unity denies the universal whole; together they say God has no parts.
• Did Aquinas show God is not a universal whole? Yes, in showing God is one; the Trinity has no subject parts.
• Are Anaxagoras’s “unmixed” and “purest” the same point? No: not mixed with other things vs. not itself a mixture; the same difference between articles 1-7 and article 8.
• Why is the eighth article last? It asks a different thing, whether God enters composition with others (not the soul of the world), not whether there is composition in him.