Summa I, Q25, Articles 5–6 and Q26, Article 1: Could God Make Other or Better Things? God's Beatitude

Orientation #

He says the abbot will cut them off next week, so q.26 must be finished then; it is “a nice place to break for the Trinity”, and next week is “the next and last class for the summer”. He refers back to “immensus, as we saw” and to “as we have shown above” (Thomas’s own back-reference) without expansion. The previous class covered q.25 aa.2–4 (infinite power, omnipotence, the past), and the next continues into q.26 on the divine beatitude.

The class, in order #

1. Article 5: the objections and the twelve legions (“Whether God can do those things”) #

Point: he reads the three objections and the sed contra of q.25 a.5 (whether God can make what He has not made).

• Obj. 1: God cannot do what He has not foreknown and foreordained; He foreordained only what He made.
• Obj. 2: God can make only what He ought and what is just; He ought not make what He has not made.
• Obj. 3: God can make only what is good and suitable to the things made; for things as they are, nothing else is suitable.
• Sed contra: Matthew 26, “Could I not ask my Father, and He would show me more than twelve legions of angels?” (said to Peter, he guesses); He neither asked nor did the Father send them — so God can make what He did not make.

2. The body: two errors about the course of things (“some have erred in two ways”) #

Point: Thomas rejects two positions that would tie God to this one world.

1. Error of necessity of nature: God acts as natural things do (seed of man → man, seed of olive → olive), so nothing else can flow from Him. He names this Spinoza: everything follows from God as the two-right-angle sum follows from the triangle; “that’s where Einstein speaks of his determinism coming from Spinoza.” Reply (Thomas, “as shown above”): God acts by will, and His will is not naturally necessitated to these things.
2. Error of wisdom and justice: divine power is determined to this course by the order of wisdom and justice. He attributes it to “Erigena” (as heard) [ed.: the transcript's name may be an ASR error]: “this is the only wise way that the world could be, therefore I’ve got to make it this way.” Thomas’s reply as he reads it: (a) granted, nothing is in God’s power outside the order of His wisdom, since power and wisdom are one essence; (b) but the order wisdom places on things is taken from the end; (c) when the end is proportioned to the means, wisdom is limited to one order; (d) the divine goodness is an end without proportion to created things; therefore wisdom is not determined to one order. Conclusion, simpliciter: God can make other things than He has made.

• His gloss: there is more than one way the world could be wise and just, because there is “no definite ratio” between the order of creatures and the divine goodness.

3. Reply 1: absolute vs. ordered power (“according to an absolute power”) #

Point: in us power, understanding and will are distinct, so something can be in our power that no just will or wise mind would do; in God they are one, so nothing is in His power that could not be in His just will and wise understanding — yet will and wisdom are not determined to this order.

• Distinction: power as carrying out vs. will as commanding vs. wisdom as directing. Power considered by itself = absolute power, extending to everything that can save the ratio of being; power as executing the just will’s command = ordered power.
• Result: by absolute power God can do other than He foreordained; but it is not possible that He make what He has not foreknown and foreordained, since His making is subject to foreknowledge, not His ability. “God makes something because He wills it; He is not able to do it because He wills it, but because such it is in His nature.”
• His summary: God does not will everything He is able to will; once having willed, “that’s determined” — necessity from supposition. Student: so the question is whether He could make a completely different nature of things? — Yes; the two errors say either He must make this by what He is, or He can’t make a foolish or unjust world. “What fools these mortals be” (Puck) — God could make a foolish or unjust world; the question is whether this is the only wise and just one.
• Why not: a world is wise and just by being ordered to God; if only one world could be so ordered, it would be “equal to the divine goodness”, like 2 to 3, but the divine goodness is infinite, so no world is adequate to it.

4. Replies 2 and 3; the best possible world (“suitable and just can be understood in two ways”) #

Reply 2: God owes nothing to anyone but Himself, so “what He ought” means “what is suitable and just”. Two readings of “God cannot make except what is suitable and just”:

• “suitable and just” joined first to est, restricted to present things → false (only what now is suitable);
• joined first to potest, which “has the force of amplifying”, with est signifying the present confusedly → true: God cannot make anything except what, if He made it, would be suitable and just. “Complicated,” he admits, but it returns to the same idea: not only one universe could be suitable and just. Reply 3: this course is determined to what now is, but wisdom and power are not limited to it; God could make other things and impose another order.
• Student objection: people say God had to make the best possible world, and “best is unique.” Answer (the student supplies it, he confirms): nothing God makes could be equal to Himself.

5. Digression: could God make a creature most like Himself? (“the number closest to infinity”) #

Point: he argues it is contradictory that there be a creature than which none more like God could be made.

1. There is an infinite distance between God and any creature (even creation as a whole).
2. Aristotle (book “of Wisdom” — he corrects himself from “Natural Hearing”) says natures are like numbers, and God made all things in number; but the creature is to God not as lesser number to greater, but as a number to the infinite — God is immensus, not measurable, every number measured.
3. As one cannot write “the number most like infinity” (there is always a closer one), so there cannot be a creature most like God absolutely. Conclusion: Our Lady is the closest of the creatures He has made, “but she’s not the most perfect imaginable”; a student cites the Immaculate Conception definition (“nothing holier can be thought”); he answers: we cannot think of anything holier, but God might be able to think of, and make, something holier. Left partly open (“I’m trying to reason that out myself”).

• Aside: some think the devil was the highest angel; Thomas gives it “some probability”; unless very malicious he might not have fallen. Aside: the rock too big to pick up — “he can do that too” (joke).

6. Article 6: objections and the twofold goodness (“four more, right, because if it were more”) #

Objections read: (1) whatever God makes He makes most powerfully and wisely, and the better, the more power and wisdom; (2) Augustine against Maximus: if God could and would not generate an equal Son He would be envious; likewise if He could make better and would not — and envy is to be put away from God (Aristotle rejects envy in God, Wisdom I); (3) Augustine, “the Enchiridion, I guess”: each thing is good, the universe valde bona from the admirable beauty of the whole — nothing is greater than the greatest; (4) Christ is full of grace, with the Spirit non ad mensuram; created beatitude is summum bonum; the Blessed Virgin is above all the choirs. Sed contra: Ephesians 3, God can do abundantius than we ask or understand. Body — distinction of goodness:

• Essential goodness (to have reason is of the essence of man): God cannot make this thing better, though He can make another thing better than it. Example: He cannot make four more, “because if it were more, it would no longer be four” — substantial difference in definitions is like a unit added in numbers (“eighth book of Wisdom, the eighth book after the book of Natural Philosophy”).
• Goodness outside the essence (to be virtuous, to be wise): God can make things He has made better.
• Simpliciter: God can make something better than anything He has made.

7. Replies to article 6: melius as name or adverb; order; Christ and Mary (“if one chord was struck”) #

• Reply 1: if melius is a name, true — than anything He can make something better. If an adverb: on the side of the maker, false (He cannot act from greater wisdom and goodness than He did); on the side of the thing made, true (a better way of being as to accidents, not essentials). His example: God could have made him as wise as Thomas Aquinas, and can enlighten us further — He “enlightened the little boys to say Hosanna” — but He cannot make the universe with more wisdom on His own side, since His wisdom cannot be more.
• Reply 2 (from the Trinity, “a little off”): it belongs to the notion of the Son to be equal to the Father, but not to the notion of any creature to be better than God made it; no parallel reason.
• Reply 3: the universe, supposing these things, could not be better, because of the most suitable order in which its good consists; if one thing were better it would corrupt the ratio of the order, “just as if one chord was struck more than suitable it would corrupt the melody.” But God could make or add other things, and so a better universe. Student: so that need not mean more wisdom? — right.
  • Aside: Msgr. Dionne compared the (looser) order among human teachers to the fixed order of angels, each illumined by the one directly above — “Dionne alone understood Thomas, and I alone understood Dionne, all the way down the line.”
• Reply 4 (“a difficult objection”): Christ’s human nature (united to God), created beatitude (enjoyment of God), and the Blessed Virgin (Mother of God) each have an infinite dignity from the infinite good that is God; on that side nothing can be better, “just as there cannot be something better than God.” “He leaves it at that.”
  • His comment: still, one person may see God more perfectly than another — “in my father’s house there are many mansions.” Student asks whether this bears on the “most like God” question; he says Thomas is only explaining what is infinite about these three. Whether a human being could have more grace than Christ: “we’ll leave that to the Tertia Pars.” But in created beatitude, clearly one sees God more clearly than another, even though seeing God as He is has something infinite about it.

8. Two criteria of better knowledge; Mozart (“one knowledge is better than another”) #

Point: Aristotle at the beginning of De Anima gives two criteria — better by the thing known, or by the way it is known.

• Example: triangle vs. God. I know better what a triangle is (more adequate to my mind), but it is better to know God. Thomas, as he recalls, says the criterion from the object makes the knowledge better simpliciter, with no qualification; knowledge of the triangle is better only in a qualified way (“more clearly”, “more fully”).
• Illustration: better to hear Mozart on an imperfect machine than rock and roll on a perfect system — Cuthbert Girdlestone on the imperfect early performances of the Mozart concertos.
• Asides: the new pope (Benedict XVI) has his piano sent in to play Mozart; Pius XII had his Shakespeare set moved in; Paul VI’s favourite poets were Dante and Shakespeare — “little confirmations” for a man “not very rectified morally”. Benedict on Gregorian chant as appropriate to the Roman liturgy; Fr. Lamothe’s chant group instructing monks at Still River (St Benedict’s). Catholic politicians on marriage: “if you were blind… but you say you see, so your sin remains.”

9. Question 26, article 1: beatitude belongs to God (“nothing else is understood under the name”) #

Point: after the unity of the divine essence, the last consideration is divine beatitude — “the happiness of the intellectual person”; four articles listed (whether it belongs to God; according to what act; whether He is the beatitude of every blessed one; whether every beatitude is included in His). Aside: the Summa Contra Gentiles book I also ends with divine beatitude.

• Obj. 1: Boethius, Consolation III (where he treats false happiness first, as more known to us, then true), defines beatitude as a state perfected by the gathering (aggregatio) of all goods; no gathering in God, as no composition.
• Obj. 2: felicity is the reward of virtue (Ethics I); no reward or merit in God.
• Sed contra: 1 Timothy, last chapter (v. 15): “the blessed and only King of Kings”.
• Body: beatitude belongs to God most of all. “Nothing else is understood under the name of beatitude” — his etymology: to understand is to know what stands under; names are “put upon” things (impositio nominis); the same etymology as “substance”. Definition: the perfect good of an understanding nature, to whom it belongs to know its sufficiency in the good it has, to whom good or bad can happen, and who is lord of its own operations. Both — to be perfect and to be understanding — belong to God most excellently. “More fully developed in the Summa Contra Gentiles.”
• Reply 1: the gathering of goods is in God by way of simplicity, not composition — what is multiple in creatures is in God simply and united; Boethius’s definition describes creatures. Thomas quotes God to Moses, “I will show you every good” — “that is myself.”
• Reply 2: being the reward of virtue happens to beatitude insofar as someone acquires it, as being the end of generation happens to being insofar as it goes from ability to act; God has being without being generated, and beatitude without meriting it. He adds: Thomas says virtue is the road to happiness, vice to misery; in the SCG the virtues of God are treated before His beatitude, since beatitude is activity according to the highest virtues; God is “beatitude itself” — “you can’t be closer to beatitude than that.”

His words #

• “Wisdom” — his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics]; “Natural Hearing” / “Natural Philosophy” [ed.: Physics].
• “ability” — potentia [ed.: power/potency]; absolute vs. ordered power (power by itself vs. power as executing the just will).
• “necessity from supposition” — once God has willed this world, He can only make this world.
• immensus — not measurable; the reason no creature can be “most like” God.
• simpliciter — without qualification (God can make better, simply speaking; knowledge of God is better simply).
• melius as name vs. adverb — the hinge of reply 1, a.6.
• valde bona — Augustine’s “very good” universe.
• non ad mensuram — the Spirit given to Christ without limit.
• beatitudo creata — created beatitude, the enjoyment of God.
• “understand” — to know what stands under a name; impositio nominis, the placing of a name upon a thing.
• aggregatio — Boethius’s “gathering together” of all goods.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, ST I q.25 a.5 (whole article, objections through replies)
• Thomas, ST I q.25 a.6 (whole article)
• Thomas, ST I q.26, prologue and a.1 (objections, body, replies) Mentioned
• Matthew 26 (twelve legions); Ephesians 3; 1 Timothy, last chapter, v. 15; “many mansions”; “I will show you every good” (Moses)
• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy III; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I; Metaphysics I (envy) and VIII (numbers/definitions); De Anima beginning (inferred: book I)
• Augustine, against Maximus; Enchiridion (“the ingredient, I guess”)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I (end); Tertia Pars
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Puck); Spinoza; Einstein; Girdlestone on Mozart’s piano concertos

His questions #

• Is this the only wise and just world God could have made? No: no world is adequate to the infinite divine goodness, so many orders could be wise and just.
• Could God make a creature that is the most like Him that a creature could be? He argues no — like writing the number closest to infinity, a contradiction; partly left open.
• What’s wrong with saying God had to make the best possible world? Nothing God makes could be equal to Himself.
• Could God make things with more wisdom than He did? On the side of things made, yes (accidentally); on God’s side, no — His wisdom cannot be more.
• Could a human being have more grace than Christ had? Left to the Tertia Pars.
• Do I know better the triangle or God? The triangle more clearly and fully; God better simply, by the criterion of the object.
• How can beatitude belong to God if it is the reward of virtue? Reward belongs to beatitude only as acquired; God has beatitude unmerited, as He has being ungenerated.