Summa I, Q.3, Art.7: Is God Altogether Simple? Five Arguments, Pure Act, and the Mistake About the First Cause

Orientation #

He opens: “we’re up to Article Seven,” having “eliminated up to this point six different particular kinds of composition” in the preceding articles (prev. lecture). He says nothing about next time. The neighbouring classes treat aa. 5–6 (genus, accidents) and a. 8 (God entering composition with other things).

The class, in order #

1. Recap of the six compositions; induction as the method (“eliminated up to this point six different particular kinds”) #

Point: a. 7 concludes universally from the six particular compositions denied in aa. 1–6, “partly by an inductive argument.”

• The six, in order: (1) quantitative parts (head, arms, organs); (2) matter and form (body and soul); (3) what a man is vs. this individual with its matter (“what a man is is not identical with Duane Berquist”); (4) essence and existence—distinct even in angels; (5) genus and difference, a mental composition proportional to matter-form; (6) subject and accident (me and my health, knowledge, shape, colour).
• Two senses of induction: from many singulars to a universal; and (the sense used here) from many less-universals to a more universal.
• Summa Contra Gentiles has the reverse order: general first, particulars sometimes deduced. The Summa’s order is “more proportioned to the student”: per ST I q. 117 a. 1 on the teacher, the first way is from less universal statements he can judge more easily to the more universal. Student joke: “This is for beginners”—his reply: more for a beginner who has philosophy, but seeing these difficult things makes you go back to the philosophy (act and ability in Aristotle is “a real preambula to this study of God”).
• Aside: Monsignor Dionne, first in Laval’s theology faculty, had to teach the philosophy faculty what had to be learned first.

2. Objections and sed contra (“those things which are by God imitate him”) #

• Obj. 1: things from God imitate him (from the first being all beings, from the first good all goods); nothing from God is altogether simple; so God is not.
• Obj. 2: everything better is to be attributed to God; with us composed things are better than simple (“mixed bodies” better than elements—gold better than fire; matter-form composites). So God is not altogether simple.
• Grammar aside on obj. 2: “hot, hotter, hottest” but not “good, gooder”; Latin melius not from bonum; same in Greek—“I have to think about that.”
• His suggestion, why simplicity is followed by perfection in the Summa: knowing God from creatures by negation, one negates composition and imperfection, yet in creatures simplicity and perfection seem opposed (animals more perfect and more composite than plants, plants than stones, stones than elements). “There is a reason why he puts those two together.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate VI—God truly and in the highest way simple.
• Aside: St Teresa of Avila—God is altogether simple and the closer you get to God the simpler you become; the sinner is more complex, “going off in all directions”; psychology emphasises the problems; Thomas’s prayer after communion asks to stop these motions.

3. Body: why five arguments (“in this article he has what five arguments”) #

Point: most articles give three (“the old rule is three is enough”; in the quaestiones disputatae two “and it’s sufficient”; more than three and you forget the first), but for omnino simplex he “wants to go all the way” with five, because of the universality of a. 7—“like he’s holding up his hand.”

4. First argument: complete induction, and simplicity as negation (“through the things which have been said above”) #

Point: since none of the six compositions is in God, God is in no way composed.

• Pedagogical note: in the SCG an argument based directly on the preceding chapter comes first.
• A complete induction is impossible from singulars (no end to them) but possible from less-universals “if they’re limited in kind”—it takes a while to see these are all the kinds of composition in creatures.
• Act and ability in every composite, two ways: either one part is to the other as act to ability (compositions 2, 3, 4), or all the parts are to the whole as ability to act (quantitative whole: “my arm is not to my leg as act to ability”). SCG has a chapter that substance-existence in angels is not to be confused with matter-form; yet the order is right, since the third (what-I-am and my flesh and bones) is closer to matter-form than the fourth.
• Genus and difference, on the side of reason, correspond to matter and form “not one to one”: genus as material, determinable by various differences; difference more formal.
• Subject and accident departs from the idea of a whole: it is what Metaphysics V (“the fifth book of wisdom”) calls unum per accidens, being by happening—not as accidental as “white geometer” or “Swedish philosopher,” but healthy man and health don’t share a genus (substance vs. quality).
• Simplex is grammatically not a negation but understood negatively: nullo modo compositus.
• On the Soul III: we know simple things by negation of composed, even in geometry. Euclid’s point: “that which has no parts.” From body (length, width, depth: all affirmative) to surface (one negation) to line (two) to point (three): “as it gets simpler, you have more negations,” because our reason’s object is something sensed or imagined, which is composed. A point can be co-imagined with a finite line, not imagined by itself.
• His argument that points exist: some bodies don’t go on forever, so they end in a surface; if the surface had depth “you haven’t come to the surface yet”; so something real (an accident, not a substance—you can’t shave the surface off the desk) has length and width, no depth; the surface ends in a line, the line in a point with no length at all—but known and defined from the others by negation. “So it shouldn’t be surprising that we know God by negation.”
• Point vs. one: both without parts, but the point has position (three points may or may not be on a straight line; three ones cannot). Hence the ancients defined the point as “the one having position.” Aristotle’s sign that arithmetic, considering less, is more certain than geometry (more controversy and case-distinctions in Heath’s Euclid).
• God is indivisible but not as a point having position in the continuous—“that’s important to see.” Same for the soul, whole in every part of the body, indivisible not like a point (which is here and can’t be over there); a fortiori God, who is everywhere.
• The mistake comes from resolving to the imagination when speaking of God. Boethius, De Trinitate, and Thomas’s expanded articles on it: one can’t resolve to imagination in theology, nor in logic. Parmenides: young Socrates imagines the universal as a sail covering individuals. Modern logicians substitute class (a multitude, imaginable) for the universal, which can only be understood. Natural philosophy resolves to sense, geometry to imagination, logic to reason. Many “Catholics in the pew” think whatever God is “must be somewhere.”

5. Second and third arguments (“everything that is put together is posterior”) #

• Second: everything composed is posterior to, and depends on, its components; God is the first being, first meaning “not after anything”; so if composed, something before him that is not God, on which he depends.
• Third: everything composed has a cause, since things diverse of themselves come together into one only through a uniting cause (“a putter together”); God has no cause, being the first efficient cause. (The difference between these two is taken up in §8.)

6. Fourth argument: act and ability; God pure act; the “simply / not simply” mistake (“in everything composed, there necessarily is potency and act”) #

Point: every composite has potency and act, which are not in God—Thomas gives no argument for the second premise here because God is pure act.

• Where is pure act first stated explicitly in the Summa? Not in q. 2 (it could have been deduced); in a. 1, second argument: the first being must be in act and in no way in potency. This repeats Metaphysics IX: in one and the same thing going from ability to act, ability is before in time; simply, act is before ability, since what is in ability is reduced to act only through something already in act.
• The main mistake about the first cause: to think it is matter. What kind of mistake?
  • Sophistical Refutations distinguishes thirteen kinds; he stresses the first two from words and the first two outside words. Each overlooks a distinction; “mixed up” is a synonym for mistaken (the child who calls a cat a dog). Kinds of mistake and kinds of distinction illuminate each other.
  • First from words (equivocation, better “mixing up the senses of a word”): “happiness is the end of human life; the end of human life is death; therefore happiness is death.” Roger Maris’s sixty-one homers “of the bat”—the bat is a flying rodent. Feuerbach: man’s mind is infinite, the infinite is God, so man’s mind is God (“convinced Karl Marx”). Physics I: Melissus mixes up two other senses of “infinite”—same kind of mistake, same word; the moderns seem never to have heard of these kinds.
  • Second from words (a speech, not a name): “the Bible is the word of God; the word of God is the Son of God; therefore the Bible is the Son of God.” Related double senses: wisdom is “knowledge of God” in both senses (about God, and God’s); Shakespeare’s definition of reason is “knowledge of reason” in both senses, Euclid’s definition of square in only one; “wisdom of nature” (philosophy of nature is about the wisdom nature shows, “something of the divine art in things”); the word of God in the Bible-sense is chiefly about the Word in the other sense, “as Vatican II teaches us.”
  • First from things: mixing up through itself and by happening—deceives even the wise, “as it did Plato.”
  • Second from things: mixing up what is so simply and what is so only in a qualified way—Meno’s mistake in the middle of the Meno, and the natural road (more known to us vs. more known simply, which Descartes confused).
  • The first-cause-as-matter error is this last kind: ability before act in a qualified way, therefore simply. Then the first being would be first matter, least in act; and the end of knowledge would split—to know the first cause or to know the best thing? “You got a split personality.” If the first cause is pure act, and act is better than ability (also IX), “with the truth all things harmonize.”
• SCG gives a whole chapter (six arguments) that God is pure act—“no potentia passiva in God”—before simplicity; the Summa buries it in a. 1 and draws on it in a. 7 and later (perfection, infinity). Earlier works are sometimes fuller: his own error about order—Summa texts on the ordo naturae in the Trinity (“not before and after but this from that”) made him think there were two kinds of order, until the Sentences showed order basically means before and after and the Trinity case keeps a difference and drops the genus. SCG also has two arguments from motion, the first backed by three sub-arguments where the Summa has one. Aside: scripture scholars saying Mark is first because shortest—his own writing goes both ways.
• Manifesting the first premise: either one part is act to another (aa. 2–6), or at least (saltem) all parts are ability to the whole (quantitative whole). C, A, T: no letter is act to another, but all are able to be “cat,” “act,” “TAC” (Thomas Aquinas College). Legs, seat, back to the chair likewise. Physics II: after the four causes and three corollaries, Aristotle says parts are to whole as matter to form (matter: that from which a thing comes to be, existing within it—wood in the wooden chair). Soul is the first act of a natural body composed of tools; in that body, a quantitative whole, parts are to the whole, not to each other, as ability to act.

7. Fifth argument: something in the whole that is not it (“everything composed is something that does not belong to each of its parts”) #

• Wholes of dissimilar parts, manifest: no part of a man is a man, of a foot a foot, of “cat” the word cat. Wholes of similar parts: a part of air is air, of water water, yet if the whole water is two cubits the part is not; part of a foot-long line is not a foot. So in every composite there is something that is not it.
• “There’s something in me that’s not me”: my matter is able to be a lion or worms—“a very precarious situation.”
• Something having a form can contain what is not it (in the white, something outside the definition of white), but in the form itself nothing alien. Since God is ipsa forma, “or rather, to be itself”—“I am who am”—he can in no way be composed.
• Hilary, De Trinitate VII: God who is strength is not made up of weak things, nor he who is light of obscure things (cf. the prayer after communion). “A little kind of subtle argument”; the three middle arguments are shorter and easier.
• His restatement: in the healthy there can be something besides health, in health itself not; in what exists, something besides existence, in existence itself not.

8. Digression: first being vs. first cause, and the senses of “before” (“are they synonymous?”) #

Point: Thomas often says prima causa and primum ens; the second and third arguments show these are not synonymous though the same thing.

• First means before all the rest; Categories ch. 12 gives four central senses of before and a fifth, crowning sense (cause before effect). “First cause” plainly uses the crowning sense. Which does “first being” use? If cause-before-effect, the same meaning; he likes the second sense (this can be without that, not vice versa: before in being)—useful later for divine causality, since creatures follow from God’s free will and God can be without them. Aristotle’s example that cause-before-effect differs from before-in-being: my sitting and the true statement “I am sitting” are simultaneous. God is before creatures in both senses. Where Thomas says God is the most perfect being, the fourth sense (in goodness) seems in play.
• Arg. 2 says “depends upon,” not “effect of”; arg. 3 says “has a cause.” The crowning sense is most like the second, since what comes after in being depends on what is before, though not as effect. Having two arguments “is probably a sign they’re not entirely synonymous.”
• How tightly before-in-being and before-in-cause are knit: act before ability simply is argued mainly in being, yet via cause (reduced to act by something in act); the unmoved-mover argument goes back into ability and act.
• “The great turnaround” (from his metaphysics course): Thomas calls Metaphysics V the beginning of the consideration of being as being and one and many, devoted to distinguishing senses of those words; it is equally the end of the defence of the axioms, whose objections (his “sophistic argument from whole and part”) you can’t answer without those distinctions. Like the US–Canada border: end of one is beginning of the other, so nothing lies between. So too from act and ability (IX) to the first causes (XI–XIV).

9. Closing: on reading carefully (“read very carefully”) #

Some things one doesn’t understand at first reading—“I’ll be back here someday.” His teacher (name garbled in recording, heard as “Kasurik”) would send him back: “Duane, read very carefully,” then show what was written. Aristotle, Thomas, Shakespeare are worth reading that carefully; most authors aren’t. Read a little, stop, and chew on it; some get “indigestion” doing too much at once; a modern philosopher often “has a dog in the fight because he doesn’t see this little point.”

His words #

• “altogether simple” / omnino simplex; understood as nullo modo compositus, in no way composed
• induction; two senses: from singulars, and from less universals to more universal
• ability [ed.: potency]; “act and ability”
• “what a thing is” (nature) vs. suppositum, the individual substance
• “existence, his being” for esse
• unum per accidens, “being by happening” (subject and accident)
• “through itself / by happening” [ed.: per se / per accidens]
• “the fifth book of wisdom,” “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V, IX]
• “Natural Hearing, the so-called physics” [ed.: Physics]
• “book on act and ability” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]
• “putter together” (a uniting cause)
• “mixing up the senses of a word” for the fallacy of equivocation; “mixed up” as synonym of mistaken
• “the natural road” (order of learning; more known to us vs. simply)
• potentia passiva (denied in God, SCG)
• ordo naturae (in the Trinity)
• saltem, “at least”
• ipsa forma, divina substantia forma est; “to be itself” [ed.: ipsum esse]
• prima causa / primum ens; “crowning sense of before”
• “the great turnaround” (end of the axioms = beginning of being as being)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I q. 3 a. 7 (objections, sed contra, five arguments of the body)
• Thomas, ST I q. 3 a. 1, second argument of the body (first being is act, in no way potency; act before ability simply)
• Hilary, De Trinitate VII (as quoted in a. 7)
• Augustine, De Trinitate VI (sed contra) Mentioned
• ST I q. 117 a. 1 (the teacher); Summa Contra Gentiles I (order; chapter on pure act; chapter on substance-existence vs. matter-form; two arguments from motion); Sentences (order); Quaestiones disputatae
• Aristotle: Metaphysics V (unum per accidens; senses of being and one), IX (act and ability), XI–XIV; On the Soul III; Sophistical Refutations; Physics I (Melissus), II (four causes); Categories ch. 12 (before)
• Euclid, Elements (point; Heath’s edition)
• Boethius, De Trinitate (with Thomas’s commentary articles)
• Plato, Parmenides, Meno
• Descartes, Feuerbach, Marx; Shakespeare (definition of reason; “wisdom of nature”); Vatican II; Teresa of Avila; Thomas’s prayer after communion

His questions #

• “What kind of a mistake is that, to think that the first cause is matter?” Mixing up what is so simply and what is so only in a qualified way (ability before act in time, not simply).
• “Where in the Summa did he show that God is pure act? Where does he first say it explicitly?” Not in q. 2 but in q. 3 a. 1, second argument of the body.
• “Anything wrong with the argument?” (happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death) The senses of “end” are mixed up: the first kind of mistake from words.
• “Is there anything in God that’s not Him?” No—so, since every composite has something that is not it, God is not composed.
• “In the healthy, can there be something besides health? In health itself?” Yes; no—likewise in what exists vs. existence itself, which God is.
• “First cause and first being—are they synonymous?” Same thing, not synonymous; the two arguments (depends / has a cause) are a sign of it. Which sense of “before” is in “first being”: left open (“I’m not sure Thomas is exactly doing that”).
• “What would be the end of our knowledge, to know the first cause or to know the best thing?” If ability were simply before act they would split; since the first cause is pure act, they coincide.
• “Is that clear enough?” (on arguments two and three) No answer recorded; he moves to the closing remarks on reading carefully.