Summa I, Q.19, Articles 7–9: God's Will Does Not Change, Does Not Make Everything Necessary, and Does Not Will Evil

Orientation #

He opens “up to Article Seven” and closes “up to Article 10 next time.” He refers back to a dialectic on “the good is what all want” done “a long time ago” (not resolved by the context block) and to “as has been said above” (article 3, not stated by him). The previous class treated q.19 aa.5-6 (cause of the divine will; whether it is always fulfilled); the next treats aa.10-12.

The class, in order #

1. Article 7, objections: is the will of God changeable? (“Variety is not the spice of God’s life”) #

He reads the four objections and previews their solution.

• Obj. 1 (Genesis 6, “I repent for me to have made man”) and obj. 2 (Jeremiah 18, God will “repent” of the evil he planned if the nation repents): whoever repents of what he made has a changeable will. He flags in advance: these will be solved by the way some things are said metaphorically of God, “just like anger.”
• Obj. 3: God does everything voluntarily but does not always command the same things (sometimes the “legal things” of the Old Testament, sometimes prohibits them). He calls this “a different kind of objection” and gives his own reply first: telling his son he can’t use the car, later that he can because he’s ready, is commanding different things to different ages.
• Obj. 4: God does not will of necessity (said above), so he can will and not will the same; but what has ability for opposites is changeable (what can be and not be is changeable in substance; what can be here and not here, in place). “So God could will that I be, and will that I not be.”
• Sed contra, Numbers 23: God is not like a man that he lies, nor like the son of man that he change.
• Aside: his grandfather’s “variety is the spice of life” is true of human life (nobody eats the same meal every day); “same meal all the time in heaven.”

2. Corpus: to change your will vs. to will a change (“it is one thing to change your will”) #

The point: the will of God is altogether unchangeable, and the whole answer turns on one distinction.

• Changing my will vs. willing a change: the average person takes them as the same. “I changed my will” posits a change in the will; “I will to change” posits a change in something other than the will. Same will remaining immobile, one can will that this come about now and its contrary afterwards.
• The will is changed only if someone begins to will what he did not will before, or ceases to will what he did will.
• Example: putting the steak on the grill “just till it’s pink”: I will to change the meat; my will has not changed. It is not true that I first willed it uncooked and then willed it cooked.

3. Two ways of beginning to will anew; God’s substance and knowledge (“in two ways is able to begin”) #

The argument that God cannot begin to will:

1. A change of will cannot happen without a presupposed change either in knowledge or in the disposition of the substance of the one willing.
2. Since the will is of the good, one newly begins to will something in two ways: (a) something newly begins to be good for him, which is not without some change in him (cold coming on, it begins to be good to sit by the fire; he imagines Thomas dictating this by the fire); (b) he newly knows something to be good for him that he was ignorant of, which is why we take counsel.
3. But God’s substance and his knowledge are altogether unchangeable (shown above).
4. Therefore his will is altogether unchangeable.

• His own examples for (b): discovering that logic, or Thomas Aquinas, was good for him. For (a): medicines good for him now that would not have been good at another age; the “atomic cocktail” for an overactive thyroid that produces an underactive one, so new medicine becomes good because of the change in you.
• Closing question: can something begin to be good for God that was not good for him before? No.

4. Replies 1-2: repentance as metaphor; first and middle causes (“God changes the sentence”) #

• Reply 1: the Lord’s word is metaphorical, according to a likeness with us: when we repent we destroy what we made, though this can be without a change of will, as a man wills to make something intending afterwards to destroy it (a sandcastle, “something that’s fun to knock down”). God is said to repent by a likeness of doing, in that he wiped out man by the deluge (except Noah and his family). He notes Thomas gives several reasons in the Summa Contra Gentiles: penance is a kind of sadness at something bad, and nothing bad happens to God; and penance implies change. “I can see why you had an article on metaphor there in the first question.”
• Aside: fundamentalists for whom God “really does get angry” (“not to fall into the hands of an angry God”; he thinks of Edwards); he doubts they made the distinction.
• Reply 2: God’s will, first and universal cause, does not exclude middle causes in whose power it is that effects be produced; but middle causes do not equal the first cause, so many things are in the divine power and will not contained under the order of lower causes (raising of Lazarus, John 11). Looking to lower causes one says “Lazarus will not rise”; to the first cause, “Lazarus will rise”; God wills both, that something is future by a lower cause and not by a higher, or the reverse. So God sometimes pronounces something future as contained in lower causes (disposition of nature, merits of the person), which does not come about because it is otherwise in the higher cause: Ezekias, “dispose your house, you will die” (Isaiah). Gregory: God changes the sentence but not his counsel. “I will do penance” is again metaphor: men who do not fulfil threats are seen to repent.
• Student: relates James, “you should say, if God wills,” since it is in your power by nature, but maybe God does not will. He agrees; and adds Thomas’s question elsewhere whether prophets ever say anything false: the prophet says what will take place by the lower causes, “if these conditions persist,” so not lying.
• Aside: his mother-in-law’s lamb-shaped Easter cake with coconut frosting (on the lamb of obj. 3).

5. Replies 3-4: God wills change; necessity ex suppositione (“necessary from ex suppositione”) #

• Reply 3: one cannot conclude that God has a changeable will, only that he wills change (the steak again).
• Student: the priesthood of Aaron said to be “forever”; he supposes a condition, as with the kingdom of David “as long as they’re faithful,” or, as Thomas says, David and Solomon as figures of Christ, many things said of Solomon fulfilled only in Christ. “More than one way to skin a cat,” or a friend’s “six ways to take out a gallbladder.”
• Reply 4 (the “little different” objection; treated more at length in SCG): though God’s willing something is not necessary absolutely, it is necessary ex suppositione, because his will is eternal: having willed something he cannot not will it, on account of the unchangeableness of his will. To us it looks confining: we must change our will as circumstances change or we learn something new; God lacks that defect. “Kind of frightening”: if he wills your salvation or damnation, “he’s committed.”

6. Article 8, objections and sed contra: does his will impose necessity? (“imposes necessity upon things willed”) #

One might think so from the unchangeableness just shown: “that’s what Einstein would think,” from Spinoza.

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, Enchiridion): no one is saved except whom God wills saved, so one should ask that he will, because it will necessarily come about. He pauses: “is that the way you pray?” (“may our prayers be instruments of your providence”): we are not praying that his will be changed.
• Obj. 2: every cause that cannot be impeded produces its effect of necessity, since nature always does the same unless impeded (Natural Hearing II); God’s will cannot be impeded (Romans 9, “who resists his will?”).
• Obj. 3: what has necessity from what is before is necessary absolutely (an animal dies necessarily, being composed of contraries); created things are compared to the divine will as to something before them; the conditional “if God wills something, it will be” is true, and every true conditional is necessary (the “then” follows necessarily the “if”).
• Sed contra: all good things that come about God wills; if his will imposed necessity, all good things would come about of necessity and free will and counsel would perish. He links this to Einstein’s opposition to the indeterminism of the Copenhagen interpretation (indetermination in matter and in our will); “here it’s taken from something maybe more known.” “This is a very subtle thing… a lot of people get mixed up on these things.”

7. Corpus: the efficacy of the divine will (“put down your pipe and smoke it”) #

The point: God’s will imposes necessity on some things willed, not all, and the reason is its efficacy, not the nature of second causes.

• The answer some give from the middle clause: things produced through necessary causes are necessary, through contingent causes contingent. Thomas: not sufficiently said, for two reasons. (1) The effect of a first cause is contingent through the second cause when the first cause is impeded by the second’s defect, as the sun’s power by a defect of the plant (his garden: same sun, some seeds come up, some don’t); but no defect of a second cause can impede the divine will. (2) If the distinction of contingent and necessary referred only to second causes, it would be outside God’s intention and will, which “doesn’t fit together” (his rendering of inconveniens).
• Better: it is on account of the efficacy of the divine will. When a cause is efficacious, the effect follows not only in that it comes about but in the way it comes about; from weakness of the active power in the seed the son is born unlike the father in accidental things (pertaining to the way of being). God’s will is most efficacious, so things come about in the very way he wills: some necessarily, some contingently, even by chance, for order and the completion of the universe. So he prepares necessary causes for some effects and defectible, contingent causes for others: things are contingent not because their proximate causes are contingent, but because God wills them to happen contingently and prepares contingent causes. “That’s the point Thomas makes every time he discusses this question.”
• Comparison: the poet, who arranges some things in his play to happen by necessity and some by chance (tragedies and comedies; Comedy of Errors), is to the events of the play as God is to the events of the world.
• Errors in both directions: some make everything contingent because all depends on God’s will, “as if that was a contingent cause”; others make everything necessary; Thomas, following Aristotle, goes to the middle ground. Shakespeare: “all my reports go with the modest truth, nor more nor clipped, but so.” Student: chance is contingent; he: it comes under it, but is not the only kind.
• Chance in history and biography changes the whole world: his Boston story (buying ovals at an old tobacco shop, meeting a Canadian professor in a hotel bar who “smokes only ovals”); the Irish boy asked by the piano teacher to play the one song he knew; Boulay hired by the man next to him on a Florida beach; people shot by a stray bullet.

8. Replies to Article 8 (“necessity in things willed by God, not absolute”) #

• Reply 1: Augustine’s word means necessity not absolute but conditional; the conditional “if God wills this, this will be” is necessarily true. Thérèse of Lisieux asking Leo XIII to enter the convent at fifteen: he answered “if God wants it,” a condition, not an approval; and God “pulled it.”
• Reply 2 (obj. 2 is “the way Spinoza talks,” everything following from God as the angles follow from a triangle): from the fact that nothing resists the divine will, it follows not only that what God wills comes about, but that it comes about contingently or necessarily because he so wills. “Thomas turns us around”: if God wills something by chance, it must happen by chance. Story: the out-of-print De Koninck book everyone wanted; a friend’s dinner in Quebec falls through, he wanders into a bookshop, and there it is.
• Reply 3: things after have necessity from what is before according to the way of what is before; what comes by the divine will has such necessity as God wills, absolute or conditional only; so not all things are necessary absolutely.

9. Article 9, objections and sed contra: does God will bad things? (“the admirable beauty of the universe”) #

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, Enchiridion): bad things as bad are not good, but that there be not only good but also bad things is good.
• Obj. 2 (Dionysius, Divine Names 4: the bad contributes to the perfection of the universe; Augustine, Enchiridion: the admirable beauty of the universe consists of all things, in which even the bad, well ordered and in its place, more eminently commends the good): God wills what pertains to the perfection and beauty of the universe. He fills this out: the poet’s play would not be great with all good people; would you appreciate beautiful things without ugly ones; Heraclitus, “it’s hunger that makes food good”; no patience of the martyrs without cruelty of persecutors; Augustine, theology developed because of heresy (a heretic denies an article, defends the error by scripture or plausible philosophy, and answering him brings greater understanding; a student adds “that’s what he says for there being divisions… those who are proved”).
• Obj. 3: bad things coming about and not coming about are contradictorily opposed; God does not will that bad things not come about, else his will would not always be fulfilled; therefore he wills them. “There must be some distinction to be made here.”
• Sed contra (Augustine, Eighty-three Questions, “quite a book”): by no wise man does a man become worse, much less by God as author; what is done by an author is done willingly; so God does not by willing make a man worse; but by any bad thing something becomes worse.

10. Corpus: the bad desired only per accidens (“the bad is desired… per accidens”) #

1. The ratio of the good is the notion of the desirable (Aristotle at the beginning of the Ethics, “the good is what all want,” reached “kind of inductively”; the class did a dialectic on it long ago); the bad is opposed to the good.
2. So something bad as such cannot be desired by natural, animal (passions) or intellectual desire (will); it is desired per accidens, as following on some good. He notes the per se / per accidens distinction is in a way even prior to simply / secundum quid.
3. This appears in every desire: the natural agent intends a form to which the lack of another is joined (the carpenter intends the chair, which involves eliminating the wood’s previous shape; he does not intend that as such); the lion killing the deer (cervum) intends food; the fornicator intends pleasure, to which is joined the deformity of guilt.
4. The bad joined to a good is the lack of another good; so the bad is never desired, even per accidens, unless the good it is joined to is more desired than the good deprived.
5. God wills no good more than his own goodness, but wills some good more than another; so the bad of guilt, which deprives the order to the divine good, he in no way wills; the bad of natural defect or of punishment he wills by willing a good to which it is joined: willing justice he wills punishment, willing the order of nature he wills some things naturally corrupted.

• Student: does God will the suffering of the damned? Answer: he wills justice for itself, which cannot be without their suffering; he does not will the suffering as such, as he does not will the death of the deer but the lion’s dinner, nor the death of the martyrs.

11. Replies to Article 9; permitting sin (“wills to permit bad things”) #

• Reply 1: some (his note: Hugh of St. Victor) say God does not will bad things but wills bad things to be or come about, because the bad is ordered to a good, and that order is implied in “bad things to be.” Thomas: not rightly said, because the bad is ordered to the good not per se but per accidens: it is outside the intention of the sinner that a good follows, as it is outside the tyrants’ intention that their persecutions make the martyrs’ patience stand out, or the heretics’ that they build up understanding of the faith. And nothing is judged by what belongs to it per accidens but per se.
  • De Koninck: he could give the whole history of modern philosophy by neglecting the per se / per accidens distinction, and a method for inventing as many philosophies as you want, all false. Marx, “man is perfected by making”: making perfects the made per se, the maker per accidens, insofar as he does not yet know how to make, i.e. is not yet a maker. Same with the teacher who “learns something when I teach”: insofar as he is learning what he teaches, he is not a teacher. Yet a Laval colleague teaching Aristotle’s Physics since 1935 still saw something new each time; great books, even fiction, must be reread (C. S. Lewis on “I read Homer, I read Shakespeare, what else is there?”).
• Reply 2: the bad works for the perfection and beauty of the universe only per accidens; Dionysius’s saying leads to something unbefitting, argued as to an absurdity (“kind of surprising he says that”).
• Reply 3: though bad things coming about and not coming about are contradictories, to will them to come about and to will them not to come about are not, both being affirmative. God neither wills bad things to come about nor wills them not to come about; he wills to permit them, and this is good.
  • Applied: does God will me to sin? No, obviously bad. Does he will that I not sin? Then I never would; “maybe that’s true about Christ.” He wills to allow it, since otherwise he would take away free will, and allows sins and evils for greater goods.
• Close: “up to Article 10 next time… we were really flying through; if you understood anything, that’s another question.”

His words #

• “changeable will” — the will of God changeable; variety is not the spice of God’s life.
• “to change your will” vs. “to will a change (of some things)” — the former posits a change in the will, the latter a change in something else.
• “disposition of the substance” of the one willing — one of the two presupposed changes.
• “take counsel” — that we might know what is good for us.
• “metaphorically” — said of God according to a likeness with us (repentance, anger).
• “middle causes” — causes between the first cause and the effect; “lower causes” vs. “higher / first cause”.
• “God changes the sentence but not his counsel” (Gregory) — counsel here “saved as will”.
• “necessary ex suppositione” — God having willed something cannot not will it, vs. “necessary absolutely”.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “doesn’t fit together” — his rendering of inconveniens.
• “efficacy of the divine will” — the effect follows not only in that it comes about but in the way it comes about.
• “conditional necessity” — necessity of the true conditional “if God wills this, this will be”, not absolute.
• “ratio of the good is the notion of the desirable”; “the good is what all want”.
• “per se” vs. “per accidens” — desired as such vs. as following upon a good; prior even to “simply” vs. “secundum quid”.
• “bad of guilt” (deprives the order to the divine good) vs. “bad of natural defect” and “bad of punishment / pain”.
• “wills to permit” — God neither wills bad things to come about nor not to come about.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies 1-4)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies 1-3)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 19, a. 9 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies 1-3)
• Genesis 6; Jeremiah 18; Numbers 23; Romans 9; John 11 (Lazarus); Isaiah (Ezekias) — as quoted within the articles
• Augustine, Enchiridion; Augustine, Eighty-three Questions; Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Gregory (as quoted in the articles)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (on penance in God; on the fourth objection “more at length”)
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) II; Nicomachean Ethics (beginning)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 1, article on metaphor (inferred from “an article on metaphor in the first question”)
• Epistle of James (student, “if God wills”) (inferred)
• Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors; “all my reports go with the modest truth”
• Hugh of St. Victor (his note on reply 1 of a. 9); Heraclitus; Spinoza; Einstein; Copenhagen interpretation; Karl Marx; De Koninck; C. S. Lewis; Thérèse of Lisieux and Leo XIII; Edwards

His questions #

• Is it the same thing for me to will a change and to change my will? No: willing a change posits a change in something other than the will (the steak).
• Can something begin to be good for God that was not good for him before? No, neither his substance nor his knowledge changes.
• Is that the way you pray, that God’s will could be changed? No; we pray that our prayers be instruments of his providence.
• Does Thomas say the answer from the middle clause (necessary causes give necessary effects) is correct? No, “not sufficiently said,” for two reasons; the true reason is the efficacy of the divine will.
• Does God will the suffering of the damned in the way he wills justice? He wills justice for itself; the suffering only as joined to it, as the lion’s dinner not the deer’s death.
• Does teaching perfect the teacher or the student? The student per se; insofar as the teacher is learning what he teaches he is not a teacher.
• Does God will me to sin? Does he will that I not sin? Neither; he wills to permit it, for greater goods, otherwise he would take away free will.