God's Unchangeableness (Summa I, Q.9): Pure Act, Motion vs. Doing, and How Angels Are in Place

Orientation #

He opens with an aside on a text he “finally found” (De Substantiis Separatis ch. 17), then says “Let’s look again at Article One,” continuing q. 9 begun last time (prev. lecture). He closes: “take a little break for a look at the eternity of God.” The previous class ended q. 8 and began q. 9 on immutability; the next treats q. 10 on eternity.

The class, in order #

1. Thomas’s authorities on the angels (“praecipui sophi, the chief philosophers”) #

Point: in De Substantiis Separatis ch. 17 (late, 1272-73, addressed to Brother Reginald) Thomas marks the break between what the philosophers thought about separated substances and what the Christians bring out.

• He calls Plato and Aristotle the praecipui sophi, the chief philosophers, “just like Albert the Great his master has said”: to be a proficient philosopher you must know Plato and Aristotle.
• For the second, Christian part he says he will follow Dionysius, who “most excellently” spoke of the separate substances.
• Berquist’s observation: on the nature of the angels Thomas follows Dionysius more than Augustine (Augustine is “a little bit ambiguous” here); Augustine is his main guide on the Trinity and grace.

2. Q. 9 a. 1, objections and sed contra (“God is not altogether unchangeable”) #

Point: three scriptural/patristic objections against God’s total immutability, answered by Malachi.

1. Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII: the Creator Spirit moves itself, though not through time or place; whatever moves itself is in some way changeable.
2. Wisdom 7:24: wisdom is “more mobile than all movable things” (he compares Heraclitus’s picture of it darting through the universe); God is wisdom itself.
3. James 4:8, “Approach God and he will approach you”: approaching and departing signify motion.

• Sed contra: Malachi 3:6, “I am God, and I do not change” — “that’s pretty definitive”; he also recalls the canonical epistle (James, he thinks) on “no shadow of change.”
• Aside: people who “want to make him change, make him more human” work from the false picture of God “frozen in time”; God is so actual “that it’s hard for us to understand.”

3. The body: three arguments for immutability (“pure act without the admixture of any potency”) #

Point: from what has gone before, God can be shown altogether unchangeable in three ways, and the order of the three matters.

Argument 1, from pure act.

1. There is a first being, which we call God (q. 2 a. 3). He notes Thomas says “first being,” not “first cause”: appropriate when speaking in terms of act and ability, since act is simply before ability (ability is before act only secundum quid, and what goes from ability to act does so by something already in act). Those who make matter the beginning of all things (Metaphysics IX) confuse what is so in a qualified way with what is so simply — “a second kind of mistake outside of speech,” which “comes up again and again.”
2. The first being is pure act without admixture of potency (potency taken here in the passive sense, the ability to be actualized).
3. Everything changed is in some way in ability: in change you become other than you are, and you cannot unless you are able to be other. Conclusion: God cannot be changed in any way.

Argument 2, from simplicity.

1. Everything moved remains as regards something and passes away as regards something (what goes from white to black remains in substance). This was shown in Physics I: if this becomes that, there must be something in this able to be that, and something whereby it differs from that — the underlying subject and the contrary that is lost.
2. So in everything moved there is composition.
3. God is altogether simple (shown above). Conclusion: God cannot be moved.

• He would like this text as a “theological footnote” to Physics I: having learned there that what changes is composed, in theology one can syllogize from “God is not composed” to “God does not change.” The Summa Theologiae proves simplicity before immutability; the Summa Contra Gentiles reverses the order.
• Socrates in the Phaedo: the simple is unchangeable, the composed changeable — though he is not sure how to show the soul simple and goes to another argument. “A very common thought” in the greatest philosophers.

Argument 3, from infinity.

1. Everything moved acquires something by its motion, arriving at what it had not attained.
2. God, being infinite and comprehending in himself all the fullness of the perfection of being, cannot acquire anything or extend himself to what he had not attained. Conclusion: motion in no way belongs to him.

• On the order of the three: pure act belongs to the very beginning of knowing God; simplicity came at the start of the Summa’s treatment; infinity comes third. One could also argue from God’s universal perfection. The Euthyphro problem: how can you give anything to God, who is everything?

4. The ancients “coerced by the truth” (“the changing depends upon the unchanging”) #

Point: Thomas notes as a sign that some of the ancients, “coerced by the truth itself” (Aristotle’s phrase in the Physics), laid down that the first beginning is unmoved.

• Even mathematical physics puts conservation laws at the beginning of everything; even first matter in a sense remains under different forms.
• Could the unchanging depend upon the changing? “I don’t think that would make any sense at all.” The reverse only seems paradoxical.
• Baseball hit to the outfield: if nothing remained the same, it would not be “the same ball” that is caught — “something fishy going on.”
• Aristotle in the biological works: you must rest on something in order to move; the mouse on a pile of grain gets nowhere because the pile keeps giving way.

5. Reply 1: Plato’s “motion” for every operation (“naming all operation or doing motion”) #

Point: Augustine speaks as Plato did, calling the first mover self-moving because he names every operation a motion.

• How “act” gets its meanings: we call motion or doing “act” first (hence “action,” “activity”); later, in the middle of Metaphysics IX, Aristotle carries “act” over to form.
  • Aristotle’s way: likeness of ratios — as my closed eye (I am not blind) is to seeing, so unformed wood is to the wood formed into a statue.
  • Thomas’s way in the De Potentia: form is the end of motion or its beginning/cause, so form is “act” by its ratio to motion. Two different ways of reasoning to the equivocal by reason — “interesting to compare those texts.”
  • Because the word is stuck with its first meaning, “act” and “activity” are never applied to form; likewise “ability” means first the ability to do (speak French, play the piano) and only secondarily the wood’s ability to be formed.
• Motion and doing used interchangeably, as words often are before one distinguishes: Metaphysics proemium uses “art or science” interchangeably for knowledge of the universal (after sensing, memory, experience), with the distinction deferred to Ethics VI; “imagine” and “think” (Henry V’s appeal to imagination), though Aristotle separates them easily — I can imagine winning a million dollars, but cannot think I have won without a reason, “when I haven’t even bought a ticket”; math said to have “no matter” and yet “understandable [really imaginable] matter.” “Is walking a motion? … when you’re walking, you’re doing something.”
• Motion is the activity most known to us. Is God’s understanding and loving himself “doing something”? The philosopher in the chair: while his eyes move down the page his wife knows not to interrupt, but when he looks up to think about what he read — where “it really sticks in” — he appears to be doing nothing. Retirement: “I’ll be thinking about God” — one is more apt to say “doing” than “moving”; “I’m kind of at rest when I think about God.”
• So Plato calls understanding and loving a movement; God understanding and loving himself “moves himself.” Thomas says there is no real difference between Plato’s self-moving first cause and Aristotle’s unmoved mover: Aristotle takes motion strictly, Plato broadly. Aristotle himself, in De Anima III, once speaks of doing as a motion.
• Further equivocation: “move” for the fourth kind of cause — Juliet’s beauty “moved” Romeo over the wall, not a push (that would be the third cause, the mover); the end “draws” us, not as the cowboy draws the lassoed cow, but as a performer is “a big draw.”
• Augustine, Thomas says somewhere, follows Plato as far as he can without conflicting with faith; here he does so again.
• The distinction behind the reply (Metaphysics IX): imperfect act (walking home, building a house — exists only while incomplete: “when I have walked home, I’m no longer walking home”) vs. perfect act (understanding what a triangle is, seeing the painting, loving someone — “when I’m loving someone, I have loved them already”). Thomas’s Latin: motus for the imperfect act, operatio for the perfect. God cannot have motion in the first sense; both are still distinguished from form. Motion strictly is “the act of what is able to be, insofar as it’s able to be,” and mutation is of a thing existing in potency.

6. Replies 2 and 3: wisdom’s mobility, God’s approach (“diffuses its likeness to the last of things”) #

• Reply 2: wisdom is “mobile” by a certain likeness, in that it diffuses its likeness down to the last things; nothing can be that does not proceed from divine wisdom by imitation, as from a first efficient beginning (mover, maker) and as formal exemplar or model, as artificial things proceed from the artist’s wisdom. The likeness proceeds step by step from the highest things (partaking more) to the lowest (partaking less), hence a kind of “proceeding” or motion of divine wisdom in things — like a hit ball slowing as it gets farther, or the sun; “every perfect gift comes down from the Father of Lights.”
• Reply 3: God “approaches” only metaphorically, insofar as we approach him — or fall short.
• Aside: the anthropomorphic error — Protestants who think God really gets angry, some Catholic theologians who think the Father got sad when Christ died. God is “rather strange”: St. Alphonsus’s first meditation on the Passion; the Greeks thought it foolishness; Hamlet to Horatio, “as a stranger give it welcome.”

7. Q. 9 a. 2, objections (“is not private to God”) #

Point: is being unchangeable proprium to God — he prefers “private to God” over “proper to God.”

1. Aristotle, Metaphysics II (“which the rude multitude call the metaphysics” — his rendering of “wisdom”): matter is in everything moved; angels and souls have no matter, “as seems to some, like Dionysius.”
2. Everything moved is moved for an end; what has reached the last end is not moved; the blessed have. Aside: those who want the blessed “to go over the action” — “there is no motion in [heaven].”
3. Forms are invariable, per the Book of the Six Principles (“six beginnings”) — a book written because Aristotle’s Categories treats substance, quantity, relation, quality but “just leaves the last six”; it says form consists in a simple and invariable essence.

• Sed contra: Augustine, On the Nature of the Good: God alone is unchangeable; what he made is changeable because made from nothing.

8. The body: two ways of being changeable (“through the power which is in another”) #

Point: God alone is altogether unchangeable; every creature is changeable in some way. Distinction: changeable through a power in another vs. through a power in itself.

• Through a power in another (God). Before creatures were, they were possible only through divine power (nothing created is eternal). As their being depends on God’s will, so does their conservation: he conserves only by always giving being; if he withdrew his action all would return to nothing (Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter IV). So it is in the Creator’s power that they not be — hence they are changeable from being to non-being. Aside: “Don’t get the wrong side of that guy” — why oppose one whose power is your being and non-being? Yet “he’s very patient.”
• Through a power in itself. Every creature has active and passive power (Aristotle’s first distinction in Metaphysics IX); passive power is that by which a thing can reach its perfection, in being or in attaining its end.
  • According to being: only where what is possible in the thing is compatible with non-being.
    • Lower bodies: changeable in substantial being, since their matter is compatible with lack of their form (my matter could lose my soul and become the matter of a lion “if they feed me to the lions”); and in accidental being where the subject is compatible with the lack (man with non-white; hair from brown to gray) — but not where the accident follows the essential principles (snow cannot become black).
    • Celestial bodies: matter not compatible with lack of form, because (Aristotle and Thomas, “we don’t necessarily have to follow them”) the form perfects the whole ability of matter; changeable only according to place, as the sun.
    • Bodiless substances: subsisting forms, related to their being as potency to act, but not compatible with the privation of act, since being follows form and nothing corrupts except by losing form; so unchangeable in being. Dionysius, Divine Names 4 (again Dionysius rather than Augustine, who allows some “spiritual matter”): the intellectual substances are free of generation and variation.
  • Remaining twofold mutability in angels: by choice from good to bad, in ability toward the end (Damascene); and according to place, insofar as by limited power they attain places they did not before — not God, who by infinity fills all places.

9. How an angel is “in place” (“it belongs to the angel to be in place, but equivoce”) #

Point (from a student’s question whether “place” here is metaphorical): angels are in place by applying their power, which is different from being contained in place.

• They are said to be where they act; place is like the object of their power. “Contact of power” vs. contact of surfaces: a sad story “touches your heart” without cutting it; the water’s outer surface touches the cup’s inner surface.
• He turns to q. 52 a. 1 (and names q. 53, de motu locali angelorum): the angel is in place equivoce. A body is in place by contact of its dimensive (continuous) quantity; the angel has no dimensive quantity but virtual quantity, so by application of its power it is said to be in a bodily place — not commensurate with it, no location in the continuum.
• A third way: Christ in the Eucharist is there not by his own dimensions but by the dimensions of the bread whose substance he replaced — “a very unusual way.”
• Student: souls in heaven? Not in place; if anything, like the angels, equivocally. Heaven or purgatory “a place or a state?” — “play with those terms.”
• Aside: hard for us because we never think without images; the Greeks’ common opinion that whatever is must be somewhere.

10. Transcending the imagination (“the universal can only be understood”) #

Point: as in speaking of God (Thomas on Boethius’s De Trinitate), one must transcend imagination in logic too.

• Parmenides: Socrates imagines the universal as a sail covering everyone — then one of us would have “animal,” another “rational.”
• Porphyry, Isagoge: two pre-logical senses of genus (a multitude descended from one man; the patriarch himself) lead gradually up to the logical genus, one said of many.
• Berkeley’s critique quoting Locke: the universal as a “mishmash” of images (dog, cat, horse, elephant) — whereas “animal” leaves out the differences; like Anaxagoras imagining matter as composed of all it can be. Genus is to difference somewhat as matter to form; Locke says it is “all of these” — really all in ability, none in act, but neither he nor Berkeley can see the distinction. Descartes says motion cannot be defined, yet cannot define it through act and ability. “These guys need the book on act and ability… they don’t read their predecessors.”

11. Conclusion and replies of a. 2 (“private to him… altogether unchangeable”) #

• Summary: every creature has some potency to change — in substantial being (corruptible bodies), in place only (celestial bodies), or in both order to the end and application of power (angels); and all commonly through the Creator’s power. Since God is changeable in none of these ways, being altogether unchangeable is private to him.
• Reply 1: the objection concerns change in substantial or accidental being through matter, which is what “the Philosopher” treats there — “meaning the natural philosophers,” as “science” unqualified means natural science.
• Reply 2: the good angels, beyond the unchangeableness of being that is theirs by nature, have unchangeableness of choice from divine power; changeableness of place remains. He notes Thomas answers about angels though the objection said “the blessed”; it is similar. Aside: with our bodies back we will have the gift of agility St. Paul speaks of.
• Reply 3: forms are “invariable” because they cannot be the subject of variation, yet the subject varies according to them; they are not beings as subjects of being but that by which something is — so it is not the existing thing that is unchangeable but that by which it exists.

His words #

• praecipui sophi — the chief philosophers (Plato and Aristotle).
• first being — Thomas’s term for God here, rather than first cause; fits the act/ability division of being.
• act / ability — his standard pair [ed.: act / potency]; potency here in the passive sense.
• secundum quid — in a qualified way; ability is before act only thus.
• natural hearing — [ed.: Physics].
• the ninth book of wisdom — [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; “wisdom, which the rude multitude call the metaphysics.”
• mistake outside of speech — confusing what is so simply with what is so in a qualified way.
• motion or doing vs. form — the two meanings of act; doing/motion first, form later.
• likeness of ratios — Aristotle’s way of extending “act” to form.
• imperfect act / perfect act — motus / operatio in Thomas’s Latin.
• private to God — his rendering of proprium [ed.: proper to God].
• book of the six beginnings — [ed.: Liber de sex principiis].
• dimensive quantity — continuous quantity; virtual quantity — quantity of power.
• equivoce — the angel is in place equivocally.
• contact of power — vs. contact of surfaces.
• mishmash — Locke’s imagined universal; Anaxagoras’s matter.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 9, a. 1 (whole article, translated and commented)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 9, a. 2 (whole article)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 52, a. 1 (body, read)

Mentioned

• Thomas, De Substantiis Separatis, ch. 17
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII and IV; On the Nature of the Good
• Wisdom 7:24; James 4:8; Malachi 3:6; James on “no shadow of change”
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act/ability, active/passive power); Metaphysics II (matter in what is moved); Metaphysics proemium; Physics I; De Anima III; Nicomachean Ethics VI; Categories; the biological works
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order of simplicity and immutability); De Potentia; commentary on Boethius, De Trinitate; Summa Theologiae I, q. 2, a. 3; q. 53
• Plato, Phaedo; Parmenides; Euthyphro
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Damascene; Liber de sex principiis; Porphyry, Isagoge
• Berkeley on Locke’s general ideas; Descartes on motion; St. Alphonsus, meditations on the Passion; Shakespeare, Henry V, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet

His questions #

• Why does Thomas say “first being” here rather than “first cause”? Because he is arguing in terms of act and ability, where act is simply first; the two are closely related.
• Could the unchanging depend upon the changing? No, that makes no sense; the changing depends on the unchanging (the caught ball, the mouse on the grain).
• Is understanding God and loving God “doing something”? Yes, we would say “doing,” not “moving”; Plato calls all operation motion.
• Is walking a motion, or doing? Both, loosely; motion and doing are used interchangeably until distinguished.
• What are you going to be doing in your retirement? “Thinking about God” — one is at rest, yet doing something.
• Is “place” for the angels metaphorical? Not metaphorical but equivocal: they are where they apply their power, not contained.
• What about the souls in heaven — are they in place? Not in place; at most equivocally, like the angels.
• Is heaven or purgatory a place or a state? Left open (“play with those terms”).
• Does it make sense to oppose someone whose power is your being and non-being? No; yet he does not show his power as we would — “he’s very patient.”