Summa I, Q.6 a.4 and Q.7 a.1: All Things Good by the Divine Goodness; the Infinity of God

Orientation #

He opens on “the fourth article here” (q.6 a.4), continuing the treatment of divine goodness (prev. lecture). He recaps that two attributes of the divine substance have now been considered, simplicity (q.3) and perfection with goodness attached (q.4-6), and that infinity comes next, with God’s being everywhere attached to it, as eternity will later be attached to unchangeableness. The previous class covered q.6 aa.1-3 and the next continues q.7 aa.2-3.

The class, in order #

1. Q.6 a.4: the objections and sed contra (“all things are good by the divine goodness”) #

The point: it “sounds pious” to say all things are good by the divine goodness, but Thomas will say no.

• Obj. 1, Augustine, De Trinitate VIII: “you see this good and that good; take away this and that, and see good itself… thus you will see God,” who is not good by another but is “the good of every good.” He notes the Summa Contra Gentiles sequence as he recalls it: God is good; God is goodness itself; nothing bad in God; God is the good of every good; God is the summum bonum. Aside: Augustine “needs to be read with care”; Thomas is the more proportionate reader, and one can easily misunderstand these texts.
• Obj. 2, Boethius, De Hebdomadibus: all things are said to be good insofar as they are toward God, and this by reason of the divine goodness.
• Sed contra: all things are good insofar as they are (Augustine, another passage), but things are not beings by the divine being but by their own being. He recalls Dionysius’ phrase that God is the esse omnium, which Thomas reads not as the formal being by which each thing is but as the esse effectivum.
• Aside: an email asking “do I exist by the divine esse?” He started answering from the Contra Gentiles chapter that God is not the esse formale omnium, then stopped to ask why the man asked; saying the existence by which I am is God slides into “a kind of pantheism.”

2. The respondeo: Plato, participation, and the exemplar (“man himself through himself”) #

The point: relative terms can be denominated from something extrinsic; for absolute terms (being, good) Plato and Aristotle differ, but both agree there is a first that is being and good by its essence.

1. In things implying relation, something is denominated from what is extrinsic: “placed” from place, “measured” from a measure.
2. For absolute terms there is “a diverse opinion”: Plato posited separated species (don’t translate “idea”), so Socrates is a man by partaking of separated man, “man himself through himself,” horse itself, and so on; likewise a separated form of being and of one, “being per se and one per se,” which he held to be the highest good and, since good converts with being as one does, God, from whom all things are good by participation.
   • Two ways Plato may have come to this: (a) the way we know must be the way things are, and we know truly through definitions of universals in separation from singulars; (b) he saw that in material things what a thing is is not identical with the thing, so Socrates is not a man through being Socrates but by partaking, hence there must be prior something that is man through itself. Problem: man-through-himself would be form with no matter, and then you no longer have the nature of man.
3. Thomas: the separated species are unreasonable, “as Aristotle proves in many ways,” but it is absolutely true that there is something first that through its essence is both being and good, which we call God, and to this Aristotle agreed.
4. Conclusion: each thing is said to be good and being insofar as it partakes of the first “by way of a certain similitude, although remotely and deficiently” (“who is like God”); so each thing is good by the divine goodness as by a first exemplar. Exemplar vs. form: when Aristotle gives the second cause he says “form and exemplar,” form meaning intrinsic, exemplar extrinsic.

3. God a cause “in two and a half senses” (“Two and a half senses”) #

The point: God is exemplar, efficient cause and end of all goodness, but not the intrinsic form by which a thing is denominated good; that is a likeness inherent in it.

• Thomas: each thing is good by the divine goodness as first beginning that is exemplar, maker and end, “nevertheless” by a likeness of the divine goodness inherent in it, formally denominating it; so there is one goodness of all things and also many goods.
• His formula: of the four causes (matter, form, mover, end), God is in no way matter; very much mover/maker and end (“I am the alpha and the omega, the beginning, the end”); and a cause in the sense of exemplar (“let us make man to our image and likeness”), but not the intrinsic form. Hence “two and a half.”
• The intrinsic goodness in me is a likeness of, an effect of, and ordered as to an end to, the divine goodness, yet “still something different.” The same holds of existence: God is existence itself, not the existence by which I formally exist; my existence is remotely like His, His effect, and ordered to Him.
• Replies: Boethius is speaking of the order to God as an end; the Augustine reply he calls “a little more ambiguous.”

4. Transition to infinity: the mind moves toward an infinite beginning (“as if coerced by the truth”) #

The point: before it has reasons, the mind naturally moves to a first beginning that is one, simple, unchanging and infinite.

• Two attributes done: altogether simple (q.3), and “for good measure” not entering into composition of anything, which He would if He were formal being. Now infinity, with ubiquity attached; God is infinite and everywhere otherwise than a body infinite in extent and everywhere in place.
• Aside from last night’s Natural Hearing class at his house: Anaximander says the infinite is the beginning of all things. Thomas, in the Contra Gentiles (not in the Summa), quoting Aristotle on the infinite, notes almost all the Greeks held the beginning infinite, in a quantitative sense (infinite multitude or extension); seeing that impossible, they realized it must be infinite another way. Aristotle’s phrase, from another context: they say it without a reason, “as if coerced by the truth.” Four of the things Thales and Anaximander say of first matter are the same in name (not meaning) as four of the five attributes of divine substance; Thomas takes time to show the two senses of infinite are not purely unrelated.
• Same drift in mathematical physics: they look for one equation for everything and something simple (Planck: the more universal a theory, the simpler); F = ma is “kind of infinite,” deducing an infinity of cases; conservation laws (energy, momentum, angular momentum; Heisenberg, Rutherford) are the most basic, so unchanging. One, simple, unchanging, infinite: “four of the five,” perfect missing because the terms are material.
• Prologue of q.7: after divine perfection (qq.4-6, goodness attached), infinity and existence in things; as eternity will be attached to unchangeableness.
• Student: why no question on God as measure of all things? He agrees: Thomas commenting on Aristotle’s Metaphysics says it is a property of the one to be beginning and measure, first of number, then in every genus; q.11 will treat God as altogether one; “these lacunae… he only had so much time,” and did not finish the book.

5. Ubique and incircumscriptibilis; the four articles (“cannot draw a line around God”) #

The point: God is everywhere and in all things insofar as He is incircumscriptibilis and infinite, which Thomas takes almost as synonyms.

• Ubique: ubi means where; “everywhere” and “in all things” go together.
• Incircumscriptibilis: “a beautiful way of speaking.” Aristotle uses perigraphē (draw a line around) for his first outline of happiness in Ethics I, later filled in; God is not that way. As infinite is opposed to being defined, so no line and no periphery around Him.
• The four articles: whether God is infinite; whether anything besides Him is infinite in substance; whether anything can be infinite in magnitude; whether infinite in multitude. The other articles are really about the uniqueness of this to God; three and four return to the first meaning of finite/infinite, in continuous and discrete quantity.

6. Q.7 a.1: the objections (“He’s this and not that”) #

• Obj. 1: everything infinite is imperfect, having the notion of part and matter (the infinite of Physics III); God is most perfect. He notes “infinite” originally means something unformed.
• Obj. 2: finite and infinite belong to quantity (Physics I, against Melissus and Parmenides, who say all is one, one calling it infinite, the other finite; since these belong to quantity, there is substance and quantity, hence multiplicity, one of Aristotle’s arguments against them); God is not a body, so no quantity. Aside: the separated soul, which he wants to imagine and cannot; it has no length, width, depth, and seems to be nothing because we always imagine; hard to transcend imagination, which even Socrates fails to do in the Parmenides when he pictures the universal as a sail covering things.
• Obj. 3: what is here and not there is finite in place; so what is this and not that is finite in substance; God is this and not that (not a stone, not wood); “pretty definitive as far as I can see.”
• Pedagogical aside: teach by giving the objections and sed contra on one page, let them stew, then the body, then the replies. He does this with the article on charity as friendship, whose objections come out of the treatise on friendship: friendship is mutual love, but charity loves those who hate you; if friendship, it must be the highest, which is between the virtuous, yet charity loves sinners. Reading alone, one must discipline oneself to stop at the objections.

7. Sed contra: Damascene (“infinite and eternal and incircumscriptible”) #

Damascene (De fide orthodoxa) says God is infinite, eternal and incircumscriptibilis, the source of the word. Why “eternal”? Because eternity, no beginning or end, is thought of as infinite; Boethius’ definition to come, tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis, where interminabilis is almost “infinite.” But Thomas attaches eternity to unchangeableness, not infinity; he attaches ubique to it.

8. The respondeo: matter limited by form, form by matter (“form being contracted by matter”) #

The point: the infinite of matter is imperfect, the infinite of form not received in matter is perfect; God’s subsisting existence is therefore infinite and perfect.

1. All the ancients attributed infinity to the first beginning (Physics III), and reasonably, since things flow from it without end: every spring things spring up, so the origin must be infinite in some way, “coerced by the truth” but mistaken as to how.
2. Some erred about the nature of the first beginning, making it matter, and so attributed to it a material, quantitative infinity, an infinite body.
   • Digression on error: from Latin “to wander,” so error is a disordered movement of reason. Christ to the Sadducees (the seven brothers and one wife) says eplanēthēte; Greek planē, to wander, gives “planet,” the wandering stars against the fixed. Shakespeare in the Comedy of Errors: “we wander in illusions.” “Mistake,” by contrast, is closer to “mixed up,” a defect regarding distinction; Shakespeare’s definition of reason as large discourse looking before and after, order, and Thomas: before you see before and after you must see a distinction. So error is a defective order, mistake a defective distinction. Aside: The Wanderer newspaper attacked with “the Wanderer wanders,” nasty to one who knows the origin.
3. Something is called infinite from not being limited (negative). Matter is limited by form: matter before form is in potency to many forms (wood to chair, table or door; the form received limits it to one). Form is limited by matter: form in itself is common to many, but received in matter becomes the form of this determinate thing.
4. Matter is perfected by form, so the infinite attributed to matter is imperfect, matter without form. Form is not perfected by matter; its amplitude is contracted by it; so the infinite on the side of form not determined by matter is perfect. Joke: marriage is “form being contracted by matter”; marriage is a contract.
5. What is most formal of all, “the act of every act,” is existence itself. Since the divine existence is not received in anything but is subsisting itself, God is both infinite and perfect.

• Why infinity right after perfection: they are very close; infinity almost says “infinitely perfect,” His perfection not limited to any genus, the perfections of every genus in Him simply, “universally, perfectly.” Thomas quotes God’s “I will show you every good” (to Abraham or Moses, he is unsure) and says “that is myself”; “what a great mind he has.”

9. The replies (“just as if there was some subsisting whiteness”) #

• Ad 1: the objection speaks of the infinite tied to matter, not the infinity attributed to God.
• Ad 2: the limit of quantity is as its form (probably the first origin of the word “form”), a sign being that figure, the termination of quantity, is a form about quantity: triangle, circle, square. Euclid’s circle is the surface bounded, not just the line; the diameter bisects the circle, and some wrongly think of the line alone as the circle. So the infinite of quantity is on the side of matter and is not attributed to God. Aristotle’s division of the categories: substance said of us by what we are; other things said of us by something existing in us, absolutely (quantity on the side of matter, quality on the side of form) or toward another. Hence we carry words over to God from quality (wise, just) rather than quantity.
• Ad 3: because God’s being subsists by itself, not received in another, and so is infinite, it is by that very fact distinguished from all else, as a subsisting whiteness would differ from all whiteness in a subject. Not that He shares a genus and is this rather than that; He is unreceived, simply unlimited, and that is why He is distinct.
  • Aristotle’s senses of being in the Metaphysics: accidental (white geometers) and per se, divided into act and ability, and being by “the figures of predication”; “figure” recurs, not quite quantity but genus and species. God is under none of those figures, in no genus, so not limited as one member of a genus is against another. He thinks Thomas is partly thinking of this (“Thomas could be confused a little bit more,” but this is in his mind). Aristotle also uses “figure” of the syllogism; the Greek for major, middle, minor term is “limit,” borrowed from quantity. “Limit” also in “definition”: God cannot be defined; motion too is hard to define as “kind of unlimited,” but differently. This is why he found the student’s “very definitive” reaction to obj. 3 funny: we usually think of a thing as distinguished within a common kind (dog not cat, wine not beer).
• Class stops at about four fifteen.

His words #

• summum bonum: highest good (the fifth SCG heading as he recalls it).
• esse omnium / esse effectivum / esse formale omnium: Dionysius’ phrase and Thomas’ reading, effective not formal being of all.
• species (separated): Plato’s forms; “don’t translate that idea.”
• exemplar: exterior form, as against form, intrinsic.
• “two and a half senses”: God cause as mover, end, exemplar, not matter, not intrinsic form.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• “coerced by the truth”: Aristotle’s phrase for the ancients saying the beginning is infinite without reason.
• ubique: everywhere; ubi, where.
• incircumscriptibilis: cannot draw a line around; Greek perigraphē (Ethics I on happiness).
• infinite: originally something unformed; said from not being limited.
• ability [ed.: potency]; “act of every act”: existence.
• error: from “to wander,” defective order; mistake: “mixed up,” defective distinction; eplanēthēte, planē, planet.
• amplitude contracted: form limited by matter.
• tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: Boethius’ definition of eternity, “interminabilis almost like infinite.”
• figures of predication: Aristotle’s categories; term = limit (major, middle, minor).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.6 a.4, whole article.
• Thomas, ST I q.7, prologue and a.1, whole article.
• Augustine, De Trinitate VIII (as quoted in obj. 1).
• Boethius, De Hebdomadibus (as quoted in obj. 2).
• John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa (sed contra of q.7 a.1).

Mentioned

• Summa Contra Gentiles, opening chapters on God’s goodness; chapter on God not the esse formale omnium; the comparison of the ancients’ infinite with God’s.
• Dionysius, “God is the esse omnium.”
• Aristotle, Physics I (Melissus, Parmenides), III (the infinite); Nicomachean Ethics I (outline of happiness); Metaphysics (senses of being; the one as measure, with Thomas’ commentary); categories; the four causes.
• Plato, Parmenides (Socrates’ sail).
• Boethius, definition of eternity.
• Scripture: alpha and omega; “let us make man to our image”; “I will show you every good”; Sadducees and the seven brothers.
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors; definition of reason as “large discourse, looking before and after.”
• ST article on charity as friendship (his teaching practice); q.11 on God’s unity.
• Planck, Heisenberg, Rutherford on simplicity and conservation laws.

His questions #

• In how many senses is God a cause? “Two and a half”: mover, end, exemplar; not matter, and not intrinsic form.
• Does my existence come from the divine esse formally? No; God is not the esse formale omnium; my existence is a remote likeness, an effect, and ordered to Him.
• Why did Plato come to separated species? Knowing truly by definitions of universals; and what a thing is not being the thing, so Socrates is a man by partaking.
• Why does Thomas take up infinity right after perfection? They are very close: infinity is God’s perfection unlimited to any genus.
• Why do the ancients say the beginning is infinite? Things flow from it without end; they are “coerced by the truth” but err about how it is infinite.
• Why is there no question on God as measure of all things? A lacuna; the one is beginning and measure (Metaphysics), and q.11 treats God’s unity; Thomas had only so much time.
• Why does Damascene put “eternal” with infinite? Eternity, no beginning or end, is thought of as infinite; Thomas instead attaches eternity to unchangeableness.
• What limits the wood to being a chair rather than a table? The form it receives, the act.
• If God is this and not that, is He not limited? No: He is distinct from all things by being unreceived and outside every genus, like a subsisting whiteness.