Question 28 - The Divine Relations

Why this Question Matters.

In the previous question, Aquinas identified as foundational to the explication of the Trinity the scriptural affirmation of processions within the Godhead. The fundamental points were made that these processions are immanent to the Godhead and that mistaking these immanent processions for the economic activity of the Trinity was at the root of the two important ancient heresies of Arianism and Sabellianism. Aquinas is now faced with the task of putting metaphysical flesh on the bones of this traditional interpretation of scripture. The basic tool that he has available to him is that of the category of relation. The strategy is quite straightforward: the processions within the Godhead define relations; as there are no accidents in God, these relations must be substantial rather than accidental; these relations are the persons within the Trinity. Aquinas will lay out the foundations for this strategy of persons-as-relations in this question and will complete it and elucidate the detailed consequences in the subsequent questions. All the while, he will navigate between the heresies of Arianism, Sabellianism and Tritheism.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas is immediately faced with a fundamental problem in applying the category of relation to the processions in the Godhead. In the Categories, Aristotle identified relation as an accidental category. We know there are no accidents in God; hence such a category is inapplicable to God. This problem was well known by the time of Aquinas and had led to a realization that Aristotle’s notion of relation (set out in the Categories) had to undergo development and modification if it was to apply to the divine substance. Therefore Aquinas’s first question: “Are there any real relations in God?” is an entirely natural one to address. The objections home in on the obvious problems: there can be no accidents in God and it looks as though the relations involved here are actually “relations of reason” rather than “real relations”. The sed contra points out that if paternity and sonship are not real relations then God is not the Father or the Son in reality but only as a construct of our minds; an obvious lapse into a form of Sabellianism. In his reply, Aquinas observes that it is only in the category of relation that we find terms that express what is conceptual as opposed to real. Sometimes the relations between things are of the very nature of the things involved; sometimes, though, they are simply because of our understanding of the world. The processions in God are of the former type, because what proceeds from the Father has the same nature as the Father; this is paradigmatically a real relation.

A2: Having established that there are real relations in God, Aquinas now spells out the consequences of this by asking whether these relations are identical with His nature. One might doubt that this is so because in the normal course of events relations are something different from the substances in which they inhere. One might also point out that if God’s nature is fundamentally relational, this would seem to make His nature dependent upon something other than itself, which is clearly wrong. The sed contra points out that anything that is not the divine nature is a creature and yet, in the liturgy, we worship these relations as co-equal to God.

Aquinas briefly discusses two aspects of the accidental categories when we are talking about created things: their inhering in a subject (that is, their being is a being-in) and their specific character (or their essence). In the accidental categories other than relation, the specific character of an accident also inheres in its subject. So the accident of height inheres in a subject and is to do with the subject alone. For the accident of relation, though, things are different: the relation inheres in a subject but its specific character is associated with being directed to something outside the subject. One possible mistake to make here (which St Thomas ascribes to Gilbert de la Poirée as the reason for the latter’s condemnation by the Synod of Rheims) is to take account only the essence of a relation whilst neglecting its being-in a subject. If one does this, then a relation appears to be something that is not intrinsically associated with a subject.

Once one has realised this double aspect of the accident of relation, then the consequences of transferring this notion from creatures to the divine substance is that the being of a real relation can no longer be accidental, it has to be substantive. Therefore a real relation in God has the being of the divine essence and is therefore the same as the divine essence.

It might be objected at this point that in identifying the being of the real relations in God to be identical with His essence we have collapsed the persons of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit into one another. But we have to remember here the dual aspect of relations: they have a being-in a subject (which has here been identified with the divine essence) but they also have a specific character to do with going-out-to (or pointing-to) something (its “relational opposite”). So the being of the relations are the same, but their pointing-to their relational opposites differ. This fact is taken up explicitly in the next article.

A3: It would appear that since the relations in God are identical to His substance, then they cannot be distinct. Similarly, one might view the only real relation in God to be that of procession (or origination); any two examples of such could not be really different, but only conceptually so. Aquinas’s answer is disarmingly simple: if we attribute something to a thing then we attribute to it everything that is contained in the definition of the attribution. In the case of relation, the definition doesn’t only include the being-in of the relation but also the pointing-to of the relation. It is by the latter that the relations within God are distinct. Therefore we can quite happily affirm that when we think of the being of God, then unity follows on this being; when we think of the relations in God, distinction follows.

A4: Having established that there are real relations in God, now is the time to count them. Aquinas has already implied that there are four: those associated with Fatherhood, Sonship, Spiration and being-Spirated. The objections list a number of putative examples which would seem to suggest a multiplication of relations even as far as infinity. Equally one might object that Fatherhood and Sonship (respectively Spiration and being-Spirated) go together as a pair and should therefore only be counted once, giving us less than four.

When Aristotle discussed relations in the Metaphysics (as opposed to the Categories) he identified that relation is either founded on quantity or upon action (or being acted upon). As there are no quantities in God, the real relations in God must be founded upon action. Therefore the real relations in God are founded upon the internal processions in God (because the external relations with creatures do not define real relations in God). Therefore, from the investigations of Question 27, there can only be two opposite relations each corresponding to the two immanent processions within God. The procession of the Son from the Father gives us the relations of Paternity and Filiation; the Procession of the Holy Spirit gives us Spiration and being-Spirated). These pairs of opposed relations are genuinely distinct as each member of a pair has a different pointing-to. The examples of possible other relations presented in the objections fail, as they each boil down to a misunderstanding of God in His single act of being.


Handy Concepts

• Following the tradition that he inherited, the fundamental metaphysical tool that Aquinas uses to build his theology of the Trinity is the notion of relation. Although the category of relation is not the most immediately given datum of revelation (that place belongs to the processions), Aquinas sees it as inevitable that any orthodox theology of the Trinity will necessarily be resolvable to one of relation.
• The real relations in God correspond to the procession revealed in scripture.
• In the created world, relations do not only have their being in some subject, they also have a going-out-to or pointing-to their “relational opposite”. We can distinguish between their being and their specific character. This twofold aspect of relations becomes critical for distinguishing the persons in the Trinity, when we generalize the notion of relation to the divine substance.
• In using relations in this way, Aquinas has explained the unity of the substance (their being-in is the same) as well as the distinction of the persons (their pointing-to is different).
• There are four real relations in God because that is what scripture reveals to us.
• The connection between the real relations in God and the person of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit will be made in the next question.

Difficulties

• It was well known by the time of Aquinas that Aristotle’s conception of relation as set out in the Categories needed to be developed in order to deal with the divine substance. (Indeed, Aristotle himself carried on developing the theory in the Metaphysics.) It is reasonable to ask whether the theory of relation was adequate by the time Aquinas applied it in his Trinitarian theology. Some would argue that his conception of relation was inadequate; others would say that it’s been downhill all the way since his time.

Question 27 - The Procession of the Divine Persons

Preamble

It used to be standard practice to divide the summa into a number of “theological treatises” and on that account, we are now moving from the “Treatise on the One God” to the “Treatise on the Blessed Trinity”. It’s now less fashionable to make such a hard and fast division, and more in keeping with the times to emphasise the unity in the work as a whole and the intimate connections between the different parts. There’s truth in both approaches: to cut the summa up into pieces risks losing the unity that is undoubtedly there; but equally we must note that the character of the work changes at certain key points, which Aquinas himself often signposts. At this point in the summa, Aquinas tells us that we are now to turn from considering the oneness of the divine essence to those things that pertain to the Trinity of persons in God.

It is important to note that, although this is not a hard division, we are moving from the realm of “natural theology” (where metaphysics can conclusively demonstrate facts about the existence and being of God) to the realm of “revealed theology” where facts about God are discerned by reason applied to the data of revelation. Aquinas firmly believed, in opposition to a number of prominent theologians of his time, that the truths of the Trinity cannot be demonstrated by means of metaphysics; they are purely truth of revelations. This does not mean that he believes that metaphysics has no role to play; on the contrary, the role of metaphysics is to show that arguments against the truths of faith are not proofs. Metaphysics can be used to show that the truths of the faith can be explained in a rationally coherent way consistent with other scientific (in the widest sense of the word) truths.

One consequence of this is that there may be many ways of approaching and expressing the truths of the Trinity; unfortunately not every way of approaching the Trinity, however attractive it may be, is rationally consistent in this way with the truths of faith and of reason. Aquinas will spend much of his time in this part of the summa showing how it is possible to misunderstand the data of revelation and how this has led people into error throughout the ages.

Aquinas’s presentation of the doctrine of the Trinity does not arise out of thin air. He is indebted to the Fathers of the Church who came before him and especially to St Augustine (in the West), the Cappadocian Fathers (in the East) and the some of the documents of the early ecumenical councils. However, it is also true to say that Aquinas produces a creative synthesis out of the tradition that is handed on to him that goes deeper and further than that tradition.


Why this Question Matters.

One of the most fundamental questions in the consideration of the Trinity is: where to start? What are we to make of the data of revelation; what in it is most foundational for Trinitarian theology? The Christian doctrine of the Trinity is revealed in scripture but, as is well known, it took some centuries before the Church was able to elaborate and define what it meant by the claim that God is one substance in three persons, by an extended reflection on the meaning of scripture. St. Thomas starts his teaching on the Trinity by identifying that the most fundamental notion that scripture gives us is that of an “immanent procession” in the Godhead. We are quite used to the creedal claim that the Holy Spirit “proceeds from the Father and the Son”; what Aquinas notes is the scriptural teaching that, in sense, both the Son and the Holy Spirit “proceed” from the Father and that the “procession” of the Holy Spirit has a double meaning (which he will elaborate in later questions). In this question, Aquinas starts his meditation on the Trinity by elaborating the notion of “procession” and by introducing two ancient and fundamental heresies (Arianism and Sabellianism) that demonstrate how misunderstanding the idea of procession can lead to theological shipwreck.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Following his standard practice, Aquinas first of all asks whether it makes any sense to talk about “processions” in God. The idea of this question, of course, is to understand the correct meaning of the word in this context and to point out how it can be misunderstood. In everyday life, “procession” usually means something like “a going out from”. The objections build on this observation to claim that such a notion of procession is incompatible with the divine essence. There is no motion in God, so there cannot be a “going out”; if something “goes out”, it is different from what it goes out from, but there is no diversity in God; if God goes out from God, it would seem that the first “God” referred to cannot be a first principle. The sed contra observes that scripture tells us about this “going out” from God; what then does it mean?

In his answer, Aquinas introduces a distinction between what we now call the “immanent” and the “economic” processions in the Trinity. To do this, he introduces us to the Arian heresy, which took the Son to be first among the Father’s creatures and the Sabellian heresy which took the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to be different modes of existence of the one God. He does this because he identifies the root of their mistakes to lie in their identification of procession purely with “economic procession”. This latter refers to the going out of the Son and the Holy Spirit into the created world from the Father. Aquinas claims that what the Arians and the Sabellians missed was the fact that this economic procession is founded in an “immanent procession", a procession that goes on within the Godhead itself. To help us visualize this idea, he gives us the analogy of the intellect understanding something; such an understanding, in a sense, both goes out from the intellect but also stays within the intellect itself. The intellect may present such understanding to the will so that (economic) action may follow upon this immanent understanding. Later on, Aquinas is going to push this analogy further; here he hints at by introducing the phrase “the word in the heart” to describe such a process of understanding. That Aquinas intends the reader to make the connection with the opening of St John’s Gospel should be clear.

The answers to the objections should be clear; the objections make the same mistake of identifying the economic processions of this world with the immanent processions within the Godhead. However, the reply to the third objection hints at a future theme. We’ve already seen that creation goes forth from God’s creative knowledge; itself a kind of procession. It is no coincidence that Aquinas will consider creation immediately after his teaching on the Trinity, as he sees the creation as an act of the whole Trinity.

A2: Having established the fundamental nature of procession within the Godhead, Aquinas immediately turns to the tasks of specializing this notion to the cases of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and of relating procession to the other words that scripture and tradition use to describe the relations between the persons of the Trinity. In this article, he looks at the description of the Son as “begotten of the Father before all worlds” (as the Nicene Creed puts it); the notion of “begetting” or “generation”. Applying the notion of “generation” to the Son might appear troublesome: we use the word “generation” to refer to the coming to be (and decay) of material things, this would clearly not work as far as the Son is concerned. Similarly, if Aquinas is going to push his analogy of procession with the conception of an idea (or word) in the mind of God, then how does he explain that we simply don’t apply the word “generation” to this mental process? Finally, if something is generated from another thing, it receives its existence from the latter. But if the Son is fully God, then He must be self sufficient existence and not receive His being from another.

Aquinas points out that “generation” can be used with a very wide meaning corresponding to a general notion of coming into existence and going out of existence but that it can also be used to refer to a process whereby something living comes into existence with the same nature as that that generated it. It is this latter use that carries over by analogy to the case of the Son being “generated” by the Father.

Replying to the objections, Aquinas points out that the first objection is founded upon the wider meaning of the word “generation”. The second objection is trickier. When we form an idea in our minds, that idea does not have the same nature as our minds, so in this sense the analogy fails. However, God’s act of understanding is His very being; hence the Son that is generated in this sense does have the same nature as the Father. Finally, and trickiest of all, one has to accept that the analogical use of the word “generation” has its limits. When we are talking about the generation of the Son, we have to understand that whilst He is generated by the Father, He doesn’t receive existence into some subject but rather He receives His existence as from some principle. The concern here is to avoid any notion of “subordination” in the Trinity (that the Son and the Holy Spirit are in any sense inferior to the Father) whilst recognizing that there are relations of order in the Trinity (so that the Father can be said to be the principle of both the Son and the Holy Spirit).

A3: Aquinas has connected the fundamental notion of procession with the generation of the Son and now he turns to the procession of the Holy Spirit. There are objections to the idea of more than one procession in the Godhead: if two, then why not three and four and so on? There is only one nature of the Godhead to be communicated, so how can there be more than one procession communicating that nature? The third objection is an excellent example of Aquinas anticipating an objection to the solution that he is going to propose: the procession of the Son corresponds to the going forth of a word in the intellect of God; the only other similar possibility would seem to be that the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds in some way to the will of God. But in God, the Will and the intellect are the same thing, therefore there cannot be two processions.

Aquinas does indeed turn to the will of God as the solution to this question. In our minds, the intellect proposes something to the will as a good and the will is drawn by its nature to this good: there is a coming forth of love, immanent to the will, towards that good. By analogy, the immanent procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the procession of love towards the word in the intellect of God. The first objection is met as there is naturally within the Godhead, this structure of intellect and will, and no more. However, Aquinas will devote Article 5 of this question to a further consideration of this issue. The second objection is met by observing that what is true in the created word is not necessarily true of God. In God, any procession would be a means of communicating the divine nature.

The third objection goes to the heart of the difficulty of the doctrine of the Trinity; it challenges any notion of there being “structure” within God, as everything in God is in some sense “convertible”. Aquinas, of course, spent a lot of time showing that we can talk about things like intellect and will in God and that these notions, though imperfect, have some correspondence with reality. So here he is not going to give up so easily! Nothing can be loved by will unless it is conceived in mind so these processions, although they are related in being the same substance, are distinct as processions.

A4: Having established that it is fitting that the procession of the Son be called generation, Aquinas now has to face the awkward consequence of his argument that one might also call the procession of the Holy Spirit generation as well. This would be rather embarrassing, as Christian tradition (here Aquinas quotes the Athanasian Creed) holds that generation is unique to the Son. To answer this, Aquinas points out that intellect and will differ from one another in the following way. The intellect understands something when there is a likeness of the thing in the intellect for it to ponder. The will wills something not because the something is present in likeness but because it tends towards that thing. Therefore the procession that corresponds to the intellect carries within itself the very notion of likeness and thus corresponds naturally to the notion of generation (whence like comes from like). The procession corresponding to the will, on the other hand, carries with it the notion of tending-towards. We don’t have a particular name for this procession immediately to hand, but scripture indicates that we can liken this to the breathing of a spirit and so we can call it “spiration”.

A5: Returning to the first objection to Article 3 above, Aquinas now shows why there are only two processions in the Trinity. Given the way that Aquinas has explained the notion of procession, he seems open to the objection that over and above intellect and will we might attach a procession to God’s power or to His goodness. Similarly, we observe that created minds have many more than one single idea and therefore surely God must have many ideas, each of which would correspond to a procession. To meet these objections Aquinas returns to emphasize the fact that we are considering immanent processions in this question. We will see later that many things do proceed from the Godhead externally but as for immanent processions, he observes that in spiritual beings (and therefore by analogy in divine beings) there are only two actions that remain within the agent, those of intellect and will. Consequently there can only be two immanent processions that correspond exactly to these.


Handy Concepts

• The fundamental data of revelation concerning the Trinity lies in the notion of immanent procession within the Godhead. Although our experience in the world is of the action of the economic Trinity, we do not have to work backwards from this (as we did when we inferred God’s existence from his action in the world) to the immanent Trinity as the latter is revealed directly in scripture.
• Two of the “great” early Christian heresies were rooted in a misidentification of the economic Trinity with the immanent Trinity. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
• The procession of the Son corresponds to the idea of a word in the intellect; the procession of the Holy Spirit corresponds to the loving movement of the will towards that word.
• The procession of the Son can fittingly be called “generation”.
• In the case of the Holy Spirit, the word “procession” is overloaded. The word is used in common with the procession of the Son but is also used as a particular name for the procession of the Holy Spirit (which can also be called “spiration”).

Difficulties

• The idea that we can use the methods of metaphysics in order to discern truths contained purely in revelation (as opposed to natural theology) may seem troubling, if not repugnant. Aquinas was well aware of this objection and gives an extended apology for his approach in the opening two questions of his commentary Boethius’s “On the Trinity”.

Relations

One of the important metaphysical concepts that Aquinas makes use of is that of a “relation”. He uses the concept in Ia q.13 in talking about how we are related to God and how God is related to us. When he comes to consider the Trinity, the notion of a relation becomes central. Aquinas will develop an exposition of the Trinity that maintains metaphysical coherence between the idea of God as “one” and God as “three” by identifying the “hypostases” (or “persons”) within God as “subsisting relations”.

This article is intended to give a brief overview of how medieval philosophers thought about relations as an aid to understanding how Aquinas uses the notion.

There is a superb article on “Medieval Theories of Relations”, by Jeffrey Brower, over at the online “Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy”.

In many ways, this article simply condenses and simplifies what is said there, so if the reader finds what is written here intriguing, puzzling or simply infuriating, relief may be had by going on to read Brower’s article.


We’re thoroughly used to using the notion of a relation in everyday language. For example:

• “James is taller than Richard.”
• “This potato is heavier than that tomato.”
• “Hannah is my daughter.”

These examples seem quite benign, but when one starts to consider the metaphysics underlying such expressions of relation one is rapidly exposed to some surprising difficulties. For example, it would seem quite reasonable to think that “James is taller than Richard” expresses an objectively real fact about the world rather than simply being a consequence of how our minds organize their thoughts about the world. This being so, it would seem that a relation has to be some sort of real thing in the world as opposed to something that only exists in the mind. Where then does this relation exist? What is it? Does it have form and matter?

Medieval philosophers started their thinking about relations from Aristotle’s treatment in the Categories (which we mentioned in our Introduction to Metaphysics). In this work, Aristotle divided what we can express about things into two classes: substance and accident. Aristotle characterises substance as that which cannot be predicated of anything or said to be in anything – “primary substances”; or as that which can be predicated of something but cannot be said to be in anything – “secondary substances”. On the other hand, accidents are predicated of things in the sense of being (or inhering) in things. There is a primary division between being in a subject (accident) versus not being in a subject (substance).

So, for example, when we say that “that cat is white”, we are predicating something (whiteness) of some thing (“that cat”). The whiteness inheres in the cat as an accident, whereas the phrase “that cat” points to that particular cat rather than being predicated of it, and certainly does not inhere in the cat. So in our sentence, “that cat” points to a primary substance and “white” is an accident inhering in that particular cat. Similarly, in the sentence “that animal is a cat”, “that animal” points to a primary substance and “cat” is a secondary substance, a universal.

In the Categories, Aristotle went on to divide up the class of accidents into nine subclasses. One of these subclasses is what we are considering here, the notion of “relation”. Aristotle’s original Greek described “relation” as “pros ti” (“towards something”) and this description gives us an important clue about the metaphysical opportunities and problems associated with relation. The other eight accidental categories are all naturally associated with a thing-in-itself: we can happily say that “the ball is big” (the category of quantity) or “the ball is in the sandpit” (the category of place) but when we come to talk about relations involving the ball, we need something else there as well: the thing that enters into the relation with the ball: “the ball is bigger than the ant”.

When we think of our original examples, a sentence like “James is taller than Richard” seems to involve a number of aspects. First of all, each of the participants in the sentence has a particular height; the relation between the heights of James and Richard is said to be founded in the heights of each individual. Next, there is a comparison between the heights that dictates whether the relation holds or not. Finally there are the questions of where this relation exists as an accident and the sense in which we can say that the existence of this relation is real.

In the Categories, Aristotle held that a relation is not a separate thing to which the participants in the relation are jointly attached but is really explained by the foundational accidents involved. This idea bears a sort of similarity to Aristotle’s approach to universals; universals are instantiated in their exemplars, there is no Platonic third realm of universals where they have a totally separate existence. However, for Aristotle, relations (as universals) are still real entities with their own existence.

In the Middle Ages, although philosophers followed Aristotle in teaching that relations are real entities explained by foundational accidents, there was a dispute between those that held that relations amounted to no more that these foundational accidents (“reductive realism”) and those who held that although relations were founded on these foundational accidents, relations were sui generis accidents (“non-reductive realism”). These latter (including Aquinas) held that we should distinguish between such a thing as the accident of height and the accident of pointing-towards other heights founded upon the accident of height.

There’s a major distinction to be made between some modern approaches to relations, where they are considered to be things that hold between two or more things and the Aristotelian (and medieval) approach in which they inhere in one thing pointing towards another.

Medieval philosophers were also willing to recognize a distinction between propositions and situations that define real relations (so called “relations according to being” or “relationes secundum esse”) and propositions and situations that simply express relative terms (“relations according to speech” or “relationes secundum dici”). In other words, a distinction was made between what serves to relate things and what simply stands in some relation. For example, if we were to come across a decapitated body with its head by its side, we might say “this is a head” and “this is a body”. “Body” and “head” would appear to be relative terms related to each other, but do “this is a head” and “this is a body” express real relations? The problem is that if so this would appear to identify substances with relations, but according to Aristotle relations are accidents. The solution is to recognize that these relative statements are describing parts of substances and not relations. If we were to go on and say “this is the head of that body” we would now be expressing a relation between two substances whose accidental situation indicates that they originally came from one substance. Aquinas refers to this distinction in Ia q.13 a.7 ad1.

Let’s consider another problem: think about the relation of “equality”. “James is the same thing as James” seems to express an obvious fact about reality. If this relation is a real thing, which we’ll call “R1”, then we can immediately observe that “R1 is the same thing as R1”. This is itself a real relation which we’ll call “R2”. We can then apply this reasoning to R2 to get R3, and so on. We soon see that our simple notion of the relation of equality implies an infinite sequence of “real things” associated with one apparently simple relational statement! This would seem the sort of hopeless mess that would have William of Ockham rubbing his hands in glee. The way out of this conundrum is to observe that when we say “James is the same thing as James”, we’re not really saying anything about James. We could quite happily substitute the word “James” with any “x” that named a substance and we’d still have a true statement. Statements like this do not express real relations (“relationes reales”) but what the medieval philosophers called “relations of reason” (“relationes rationes”). In this example, we notionally posit a relation founded on the unity of the substance concerned.

There are also problems in other directions and Aristotle seems to have identified some of these problems in his Metaphysics, suggesting that he himself knew that the treatment in the Categories would not ultimately be sufficient for all circumstances. Much of the medieval debate about relations amounts to a debate about how to relate the theory of relations given in the Categories with that advanced in the Metaphysics and then how to square this resolution with the data of revelation about God.

As we saw, our original examples given above seem to be based on accidents in both the objects appearing in the relations concerned. “James is taller than Richard” depends upon a fact about James’ height and a fact about Richard’s height and a comparison between the two. However, this need not be the case.

• “Richard is thinking about Fiona.”

This sentence seems to express a relation between Fiona and Richard that only depends upon some fact about Richard (that he is currently thinking about Fiona). There would seem to be nothing about Fiona that is involved in this relation. (If one argues that “Fiona is known by Richard” is the underlying fact about Fiona that grounds this relation, one should consider that this is just another way of saying “Richard knows Fiona”).

• “I have arrived at a position to the right of the column”.

Similarly, this sentence provides another example where it is a fact about me that founds the relation rather than any fact about the column. In both of these examples there is a profound asymmetry. Medieval philosophers dealt with these examples by using the idea of a “relation of reason” that we saw above. They considered that even if there were no case for considering one side of the relation being real (or extra-mental) we should consider it as if it were so, projecting the mental relation onto the subject concerned. In examples such as these, there is both a real relation and a relation of reason involved. Philosophers such as Aquinas were quite happy to consider that certain relations did not introduce something in extra-mental reality. The discussion in Ia q.13 a.7 gives a clear example of Aquinas exercising these concepts of real relation and relation of reason simultaneously.

• “I am thinking about those two chairs.”

This sentence would seem to set up a relation between two chairs (as well as a relation between me and the two chairs). But surely this relation expresses no facts inherent in the chairs themselves. Here we have an example where the relations involved are purely those of reason.

Finally, we come to the examples that motivated much discussion in the middle ages about the nature of relation and about whether the notion of relation put forward by Aristotle was adequate when dealing with the metaphysics of theism.

• “God the Son is the son of God the Father.”
• “The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son.”

We already know from Aquinas that when we talk about God, we often talk analogically. Does this apply here, when we talk about relations involving God? Or are these statements literally true, and if so, how are we to understand them?

If we take the statement “Jesus is the Son of God” as being true, then it appears to set up a relation between God the Father and the God the Son. If we were to consider this relation to be purely one of reason, then we would fall into the heresy of Sabellianism (the idea that the distinction between the persons of the Trinity is purely notional). If we were to suggest that the relation is real in the Son and a relation of reason in the Father, then we would be falling into the error of Arianism (that the Son of God is a creature) because the reality of the relation in the Son would correspond to an accident in the Son which would imply that the Son was a creature. If the relation were real in both God the Father and in God the Son then we would seem to have set up accidents in both of them, contrary to the doctrine of divine simplicity.

Aquinas’s solution is simple and bold: when we consider relations concerning the divine persons, those relations can correspond to substances rather than accidents. Aquinas will spend much of Questions 27-43 of the first part of the summa developing the idea that the persons of the Blessed Trinity are subsisting relations within the Godhead.

Question 26 - God's Beatitude

Why this Question Matters.

This is the last question “concerning what belongs to the unity of God’s essence”, the so-called “Treatise on the One God”. Aquinas has already reflected on beatitude as the last end of rational creatures; but now it is time for Him to consider how we might pre-eminently attribute beatitude to God Himself.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas needs to define what he considers beatitude to be, so that he can overcome objections that suggest beatitude is to do with the accumulation of goods or is to do with being the reward for merit (which would make no sense for God). He states that beatitude is the “perfect good for an intellectual being” where that being is capable of grasping its own satisfaction with the good it possesses; is capable of doing well or badly; and is master of its own actions. From this definition, it is clear that beatitude belongs especially to God.

A2: When we think about God, although He is entirely simple, we can think about Him under different aspects. We can think about Him from the point of view of His essence or from the point of view of His will or of His intellect. How should we be thinking of Him when we consider His beatitude? One might consider beatitude, as it is to do with the good, to be to do with essence; similarly, as beatitude is to do with an end, one might also consider it under the aspect of the will. However, Aquinas insists that God’s beatitude is associated with His intellect. Everything with intellect desires to be blessed and the most perfect thing in an intellectual creature is the intellect by which it grasps all things. Hence the beatitude of an intellectual creature lies in intellectual activity. In God, being and understanding are really identical, but we can understand them in different ways. So it is appropriate for us to think of God’s beatitude in terms of His intellect.

A3: We might be inclined to simply identify the beatitude of those who are blessed with God Himself. Aquinas takes care to distinguish between intellect thought of as having an object to understand and intellect as the thing that does the understanding. In the first sense God is indeed beatitude as He is the object of the understanding intellect. But in the second sense, we should understand beatitude as something actually created in those who are blessed.

A4: Finally, Aquinas asks whether God’s beatitude encompasses all beatitude. As beatitude is a kind of perfection and God’s perfection includes every other sort of perfection (Question 4 Article 2) the answer is a straightforward “yes”. Anything desirable in a beatitude pre-exists in God’s beatitude. Aquinas takes this opportunity, at the end the “Treatise on the One God”, to offer a brief hymn of praise to God’s glory.

Question 25 - God's Power

Why this Question Matters.

Having talked about God’s willing and His knowledge, together with things such as His providence that arise from them, it is quite natural for Aquinas to discuss God’s power; that by which God acts as an agent. We commonly call God infinitely powerful and also omnipotent, but what do these mean? A common objection to the notion of omnipotence is that it implies contradictions: if God is omnipotent what is to stop Him from creating a stone so heavy that He cannot lift it? Aquinas’s strategy is to pursue a careful line of enquiry as to what these terms mean, turning the common objections on their heads.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas begins his discussion of the power of God by asking whether there is power in God. This does seem a very curious question but the very first objection against the thesis indicates the need for the precision that Aquinas will bring to bear throughout this question. The Latin word potentia, which is here translated as “power” can also be translated as “potentiality” and, as we have seen, God is pure actuality with no admixture of potentiality. This play on words indicates the need to distinguish between two kinds of potentia: a passive power that corresponds to the ability to be acted on by an agent, and an active power facilitating acting as an agent on other things. Clearly God has no potentia in the first sense but has it pre-eminently in the second sense. A number of objections are made that are each based on confusion about God’s simplicity. For example, power is a source of action (or actuality) but God’s actuality is his essence but His essence has no source. Aquinas replies that power, in the context of God, should properly be thought of in terms of the source of effects rather than of actions and this approach frees us from the contradiction. Similarly, as God’s knowledge and will are the cause of all things, the notion of power seems to be redundant. As before, Aquinas is willing to distinguish between what is real in God and what is conceptually useful for us in talking about God.

A2: We commonly think that there can be no limit to God’s power both in terms of amount and extent but this would seem to lead to problems when God applies His power to the created world. Any infinite power would seem to bring about an infinite effect; in particular, infinite force acting on a body would accelerate it to infinite velocity. But these are impossible. God’s active power clearly has to be infinite, as God’s essence is infinite (Question 7 Article 1), so the apparent contradictions must lie in confusion about How God’s power acts in creation. The confusion is twofold but basically arises from pushing the analogy of action within creation with God’s action too far. If a body were acting on another body with infinite power then we do indeed reach a physical nonsense. However, God is not a body nor does He act as a univocal agent. When the first body acts on the second its power is ordered entirely towards the single end of moving the second body. It has no “choice” in how it acts on the body; its action is strongly coupled and subordinated to the end of moving the second body. When God acts in creation He acts as a non-univocal agent whose power is not subordinate to any of its effects as an and. He chooses the end He wishes to achieve and uses as much of His power as is appropriate.

A3: Having dealt with the question of the infinitude of God’s power, Aquinas now turns to the question of the extent of God’s power: is God omnipotent? The problems that Aquinas has to face in this article are made clear in the objections: surely omnipotence means “being able to do anything”? But if God is omnipotent then he can act upon Himself; He can sin; He can create a weight that He cannot lift! Moreover, if God can do anything, then it would seem that what there is in the world and how it all fits together is entirely down to God’s will; there can be no notion of necessity in the world at all. Aquinas confesses that God is omnipotent but immediately admits that what omnipotence amounts to is non-trivial to determine. Aquinas’s solution is that God can do anything that is possible. What then does “possible” mean? According to Aristotle, one of the meanings of “possible” relates to what is possible to a particular power (this is called relative possibility). I can lift a fifty kilogram weight, but I cannot life a hundred kilograms. We might think that what is possible to God is simply the sum of all that is possible to created powers, but this seems far too restrictive. Neither can we say that God can do what is open to God’s power, as that would be circular. Aristotle’s second meaning of “possible” relates to what is absolutely possible. In this sense something is possible if it doesn’t involve an inherent contradiction. Put another way, a state of affairs is absolutely possible if it can have being. Nothingness is the only thing that contradicts being, so whatever simultaneously implies being and non-being cannot be absolutely possible and is beyond the remit of God’s omnipotence. Aquinas coins a neat way of putting it: “the best thing to say, however, is that they cannot be brought about, not that God cannot bring them about”.

A4: Having determined that God’s power stretches to all that is non-contradictory, Aquinas asks whether He can make the past not to have been. In other words (given article 3), is the mutability of the past inherently contradictory? In Question 10 Aquinas discussed time, aeviternity and eternity and it was clear there that understanding the relationship between a being that exists “in eternity” and beings that exist “in time” is a tricky philosophical problem. If one thinks of the analogy where God “looks” down on the four dimensional space-time universe, grasping all of it in one go, then it would not be too difficult to imagine that God may fiddle with what is in the past (as far as we are concerned). However attractive this analogy may seem, it can be misleading and Aquinas claims that to be able to change the past is inherently impossible. We feel perfectly at ease with the idea that saying Socrates is both seated and standing is a contradiction; Aquinas claims that to say Socrates was seated and was standing (simultaneously) is also a contradiction. If this little argument is not enough, the authority of Augustine and Aristotle are called on to bolster the argument.

A5: Since God foresees and pre-ordains what He actually brings about it would seem that God is unable to bring about what He does not bring about. In other words, God is constrained in what He brings about by what He actually brings about because of the way that He brings it about. Aquinas has already pointed out in Question 19 Article 3 that God’s will is not constrained by any natural necessity, so the fact that things have come about from God in the way they have is not a constraint on God. God was perfectly free to create the universe in whatever way He pleased. Similarly it is not correct to think of God’s plan of wisdom and justice as constraining Him. The confusion seems to lie in the fact that God brings all things to be in His single act of being; because we think of His single act of being under a number of different conceptual guises (His being, His essence, His power, His justice, His providence and so forth) we are liable to think of these different aspects constraining each other. We have to be careful not to allow these different conceptual approaches to God to obscure the single underlying reality. A further useful distinction to make that allows us to think coherently in terms of these conceptual distinctions without falling into the trap of thinking that their mutual inter-relationships constrain God, is between the Absolute Power of God and the Ordained Power of God. The absolute power of God refers to His radical freedom to bring about whatever He wills to bring about. His ordained power refers to His power to bring about whatever He has pre-ordained to bring about by reason of His just will.

A6: Having shown that God, by His absolute power, is not constrained in what He brings into being, we might ask whether He can make things better than He does. Aquinas answers this question by making a number of distinctions about how things could be made better. If we think of a particular thing then, as far as its essence goes, God cannot make it any better than it is because to do so would be to change its essence and therefore make it something different. He can, of course, make something different instead of what He has actually made. Although God cannot improve the essence of something without changing what it is, He can make its non-essential characteristics better; so a human can become wiser or more virtuous, for example.


Handy Concepts

• God’s power refers to His active power rather than to any notion of passive power or potentiality.
• God’s omnipotence reaches to everything that is consistent with being. This is sometimes formulated as the “Principle of non-contradiction”, that something cannot simultaneously be and not be.
• We distinguish between the Absolute Power of God and the Ordained Power of God. The former refers to His power to bring about whatever He wills, the latter to His power to bring about what He wills.

Difficulties

• In Article 3 Aquinas claims that God can only do what is inherently possible, in the sense of not involving a contradiction. He also states this in the form of saying that a state of affairs cannot simultaneously be and not be. Later thinkers such as Descartes claimed that part of God’s creative activity involves determining what the laws of logic themselves are. Therefore Aquinas’s “Principle of non-contradiction” is itself under God’s power. God could have made creation with different logical rules. This point of view is related to later medieval developments in the idea of the absolute power of God. As Aquinas himself observed, this idea is rationally incoherent, as our minds are subject to the laws of logic and anything outside this cannot be thought about: it is not to hard to turn the assertion itself into a contradiction (as far as our laws of logic are concerned!)
• The argument in Article 4 that the past cannot be changed depends on something in the past having a sort of absolute existence. To assert a different past is therefore to assert a simultaneous being and non-being, because the event in the past has real being. But what happens if one attempts to argue that God “changing” an event in the past involves that event never having had existence? It would seem that to do so, one would have to leave any coherent notion of philosophical realism behind.

Question 24 - The Book Of Life

Why this Question Matters.

Several times in scripture, both in the Old Testament and in the New, reference is made to the “Book of Life”. Clearly this book has something to do with the ultimate destiny of individual humans. In the article Aquinas clarifies the meaning of this term and reconciles some different accounts of its meaning found in the Christian tradition.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: As the “Book of Life” has something to do with the ultimate destiny of individual humans, a good question to ask is if this “book” is identical to predestination. Aquinas answers that, primarily speaking, the “Book of Life” is God’s knowledge of who He has predestined to eternal life and that the terminology of a “book” is a metaphor with the human activity of recording facts in books. However, Aquinas is willing to concede that the term “Book of Life” is open to more than one meaning. In particular, it can also refer to the Old and the New Testaments of the Bible inasmuch as the latter record those things that lead to life and it can also refer to the divine force which enables all to remember their deeds inasmuch as they lead to life. So although the “Book of Life” is about predestination there is a conceptual distinction between the two.

A2: One may also ask whether the “Book of Life” refers only to the elect predestined to glory or whether other things (such as God’s life or the life of all of nature) are recorded there. Aquinas insists that the “Book of Life” refers to those destined to glory because it is primarily to do with election to something beyond the natural. Neither God’s life, nor the course of the natural world involve election beyond what is natural to them, therefore they are not the subject of the “Book of Life”. In replying to the last of the objections, Aquinas observes that the life of grace is not in itself the end of life, but rather a means to the end. So one is only elected to the life of grace insofar as one is elected to the life of glory; conversely the fact that one is at some time granted grace does not imply that one is therefore predestined for glory. Those who ultimately fall from grace are said to be conditionally elected and their names are written in the book of life conditionally rather than absolutely. Aquinas will return to this point in the third article.

A3: It would seem that if one’s name is written in the “Book of Life” then it cannot be erased from there, as the election to eternal life is infallible. Aquinas recognizes that sometimes something is said to be done when it becomes known; therefore one might argue that one can say that a person is entered into the “Book of Life” when their grace becomes known and their name erased when it is clear that they have fallen from grace. Having said this, Aquinas still insists that human opinion is of secondary importance here; the “Book of Life” concerns objectives facts rather than human opinions. However, continuing the thread of argument in the reply to the final objection in Article 2, he recalls that the “Book of Life” is to do with elevation to the supernatural order and that therefore the “Book of Life” also contains the names of those who are conditionally elected. It is almost as if the “Book of Life” contains two sections: those unconditionally elected to glory and those conditionally elected. The names in the first part cannot be erased, but those in the second part can.


Difficulties

• It seems a little curious that Aquinas makes no mention of the other books referred to in Apoc. 20: 11-12 out of which the deeds of all (predestined and reprobated) are recalled.

Question 23 - Predestination

Why this Question Matters.

The predestination of the elect to glory is one of the great mysteries of the Christian religion. Consideration of predestination in general leads to a range of difficult questions: Why do some go to heaven and some to hell? If God is all-powerful why does He not redeem everybody? How can it be just that the elect are chosen irrespective of their merits? How does predestination differ from predetermination? If predestination is true, why should we not all be fatalists? Aquinas sees predestination as a special case of God’s providence which itself originates in God’s will. In this article he brings all the resources that he has developed in the previous questions concerning God’s will to bear on the question of predestination. In doing so, Aquinas set the parameters for discussion of predestination and the co-operation of primary and secondary causes for the next seven centuries.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: In this introductory article, Aquinas recalls that providence is the ordering by God of created things to their end and that everything falls under His providence. He goes on to identify that the destiny of a creature may simply be proportionate to its created nature or it may exceed its nature. For rational creatures, this latter is eternal life which consists in the vision of God. If the destiny of a creature is to exceed its created nature then it has to be lifted up to such a destiny by God. Such a destiny pre-exists in God and this planned sending of the rational creature to eternal life is called predestination. Therefore predestination is a part of the providence that applies to some humans and angels. Predestination is therefore not predetermination which implies a necessity of the end.

A2: Aquinas has identified that predestination is that part of providence to do with the sending of some rational creatures to eternal life. He now asks whether those predestined to eternal life carry a mark of their destiny within themselves. Here he seems to be thinking in terms of a parallel to the baptismal seal on the soul. Despite this attractive parallel, Aquinas denies that the predestined are identified in such a way. Predestination is part of providence and as such exists in the mind of God. However, recalling the distinction made in Question 22 Article 3 between provenance and governance, Aquinas distinguishes between “active” part of predestination that exists in the mind of God and its “passive” part that exists in the predestined: the predestined carry out the plan of predestination as a “calling” that can be attributed to them.

A3: Predestination is the sending of certain rational creatures to their eternal destiny in the divine vision. If some, but not all, rational creatures are sent to such a destiny, does this not imply that the remainder are sent to a rather less fulfilling destiny in a similar fashion? There are two questions wrapped up together in this article: does God reprobate some rational creatures to eternal damnation and is such reprobation a parallel to predestination so that there is a so-called “double predestination” (to heaven and to hell)? Aquinas’s answer to these troubling theological questions has become the standard account: God does reprobate some rational creatures but their reprobation is not a parallel to predestination. Predestination is a part of providence and, as was pointed out in Question 22 Article 2, the workings of providence may allow for failures. Therefore predestination is to do with those who are destined to eternal glory whereas reprobation pertains to those who will fall short of this goal. Aquinas notes that reprobation is not simply to do with God’s foreknowledge of those who will fail but also involves the intention to permit the reprobate to fall into sin and to impose the consequent punishment. In reply to the objections, Aquinas points out that although God loves all rational creatures and wills certain goods to all of them, He does not thereby will every good to all rational creatures. Dealing directly with the objection that reprobation must be to a person rejected like predestination to a person predestined, Aquinas answers that causality differs between the two cases. Predestination causes both the future gift of glory and the present gift of grace in the predestined. Reprobation does not cause anything in the present; that is, it is not the cause of sin which is to be attributed to the free will of the reprobate. It is the cause of the abandonment of the sinner by God and of the eternal damnation that is the just penalty for the sin freely willed by the reprobate. But if someone is reprobated by God, how can he be held accountable and punished for what he cannot avoid? Aquinas answers that lacking the gift of grace does not take anything away from the rational creature that he previously had; he remains responsible for his inability to avoid sin and is therefore justly punished.

A4: The fourth article asks what may seem to be a curious question: are the predestined elected (that is, chosen) by God? At first it may seem unclear what the question even means! A guide to what is going on in the article is found in the answer that Aquinas gives: predestination logically presupposes election, and election logically presupposes love. He wants to make a contrast between election (or choice) and love in us with that in God. We are spurred to love someone by a pre-existing good in that person; we choose that person because of that good and then we love them. So in us, a good precedes election which precedes love. The important point is that this order is reversed when it comes to God. God’s love for someone creates the good in them; so that God’s love for that person singles them out (or elects them) and creates the good (predestining them to glory). From Question 20 Article 3, we know that although God loves all of creation, he also loves some more than others. This inequality implies choice of some over others.

A5: One of the most puzzling questions about predestination is this: why are some predestined to glory and others not? An obvious answer might seem to be that God has foreknowledge of those who would be meritorious in response to the gift of grace and of those who would not be, and restricts the gift of grace to those who will. So, if we put it formally we might ask: is foreknowledge of merit a cause of predestination? This might appear a very appealing position to take, not least because it avoids the awkward conclusion that God would otherwise appear to be arbitrary and unjust. However, it must be pointed out that this solution has it own problems. After all, God creates the beings whose reactions He foresees, so it would seem that the problem of arbitrariness is simply pushed back to His creative decisions: why would God create some who would react well to grace and others who wouldn’t?

Aquinas starts his considerations of this question with a reminder of the conclusion of Question 19 Article 5 that it impossible to assign a cause of God’s act of will from the point of view of the act of willing itself. All we can do is to explain those relationships between acts of will where God wills one thing to exist for the sake of another. Aquinas is usually respectful of opinion with which he disagrees, but here he is willing to describe as “crazy” those who might be foolish enough to consider merit to be a cause of the very act of predestining. The questions that are valid concern whether there can be any relationship between merit and predestination and if so, what? The idea that those meritorious in a previous life are predestined in this life is rapidly dismissed. Similarly dismissed is the Pelagian argument that the first movement towards God in a human is made by the human themselves.

Aquinas now turns to the question of God’s foresight of the merits of those predestined. He immediately points out a central weakness in the thinking of those who propose this position: there is an incorrect separation between God acting as first cause and human free will acting as secondary cause, as if they were two independent modes of causality. The correct position is that secondary causes act concomitantly with the first cause; if we grasp this then we realize that human acts of freewill are themselves part of predestination. “God’s providence produces effects through the operation of secondary causes, so what comes from freewill comes from predestination.”

However, instead of finishing there and dismissing the question with a firm “no”, Aquinas goes on to make a subtle distinction. If we look at the predestination of an individual as a whole process, then we simply cannot assign a cause to it other that God’s particular act of goodness. However if we look at the internal structure of predestination (again following the lead of Question 19 article 5) we can see that we can attribute causal relationships between the components of predestination. A later effect of predestination may be considered a final cause of an earlier effect, for example. In this restricted sense, we can say that God preordains glory to someone because of his merits, but we must simultaneously say that He preordained that He would give him the grace required for him to merit that glory.

The third objection to this question is based on the argument from injustice: if God arbitrarily chooses some for predestination to glory (not based on any feature of those chosen or not chosen), then this is fundamentally unjust and so cannot be said of God. Aquinas’s reply to this objection is a long reflection on God’s goodness, which essentially concedes that we have reached the point where rational explanation gives way to mystery. God’s predestination is based on God’s goodness and Aquinas argues that the fact that some are chosen for glory whereas others are reprobated for punishment simply reflects that we have to consider the common good of creation as a whole: “God permits certain evils to be effected lest many goods should be impeded”. It appears that it has to be so for the greatest good of creation as a whole. However, when we turn to the question of why any particular individuals are predestined or reprobated, explanation runs out. Aquinas makes an interesting parallel concerning the composition of natural objects: why does God choose this particular bit of prime matter rather than any other bit of prime matter to be informed to become this particular rock? The reason lies in God’s will and is not open to our view. As to whether this is unjust, Aquinas points out that the gift of grace is exactly that: a gift that is owed to no-one. It cannot be considered unjust that God chooses to give a gift to some but not to others.

A6: Predestination, emanating from God’s will, might seem to be infallible. But equally, one might imagine circumstances where one of the elect happens to die suddenly whilst not in a state of grace. Aquinas reiterates that the order of providence and therefore that of predestination is infallible. However, this does not impose necessity on the course of events. As was argued before (Question 22 Article 4), God arranges contingent causes to bring about effects contingently and necessary causes to bring about necessary things. If someone is predestined, then in a hypothetical sense they could lose that predestination, but actually they cannot.

A7: Are there a fixed number of the predestined? Aquinas answers that there are and that this fixed number is made up of specific elect individuals rather than simply being a fixed number of vacancies to be filled up by unspecified individuals. This follows simply from what he has said in the previous article. As so often when there is a straightforward answer to the question, Aquinas probes deeper. He points out that it is not simply the case that God knows how many of the elect there are, but that His knowledge of this number is (through His determination) creative of that number. To illustrate this, Aquinas points out that in construction projects there are certain elements that are essential to the construction (knowing how many rooms there are to be, for example) and there are certain elements (the exact number of bricks, for example) that are incidental to the project. Something analogous pertains to the universe: there are elements within creation, the exact details of which don’t really matter; there are also other elements that do matter. One of those things that matters for the purpose of the universe is those rational souls that attain the beatific vision; hence God has planned their exact number and their identity in creating the universe. Aquinas will not speculate as to the number of the elect.

A8: Finally, Aquinas asks whether the prayers of the holy can contribute to predestination. The answer might seem to be an obvious “no” because whether or not someone is elect is determined in God’s will. However, Aquinas’s answer is much more subtle than that and gives us an important insight into how Aquinas regarded prayer. We can generalize from the context of predestination: what effect can prayer have on God’s will? Aquinas deals first with the simplistic approach that prayer is simply superfluous by observing that scripture admonishes us to pray, therefore it cannot be entirely irrelevant. He goes on to dismiss the contrary position that God’s predestination is changed by prayer again by appeal to scripture. To answer the question, Aquinas observes that as far as the very act of predestining itself is concerned, prayer has no effect. But if we consider the internal structure of predestination (following the lead of Question 19 Article 5 yet again) then we can see that God provides secondary causes that work together to effect the fulfilment of God’s primary-causal act of predestining. Prayer is one of these secondary causes; therefore it is quite appropriate to pray that someone may be predestined and that the predestined pray for themselves, for these prayers are all part of the matrix of secondary causes that God has ordained to bring about the purpose of the first cause.


Handy Concepts

• Article 1 provides some of the material concerning the effect of grace in elevating rational creatures beyond their natural powers that became so important in the twentieth century arguments over the supernatural.
• Aquinas makes extensive use of the argument in Question 19 Article 5 concerning the attribution of causes to God’s will. The act of willing itself is beyond causal analysis, but the internal structure of the effect of the act of will may be so amenable.
• Despite Aquinas demolishing the idea that predestination may be associated with God’s foreknowledge of merit in the elect (Article 5), the idea came back in the form of the scientia media of Molinism. A good punch-up was had at the end of the sixteenth and into the start of the seventeenth century between the Jesuit supporters of Molinism and the Thomists concerning such relationships between grace and freewill in general. The Congregatio de Auxiliis was formed by the pope in order to decide between the warring factions, but no conclusion was reached save for an order to the parties to stop accusing each other of heresy. The decision was reserved to the Holy Office and we are still awaiting their decision today.
• In the reply to Objection 3 in Article 4, Aquinas revisits the notion of God’s antecedent will and His consequent will (which we saw in the reply to the first objection in Article 6 Question 19). Antecedently and relatively speaking, God wills all to be saved; according to His consequent will and simply speaking, it doesn’t necessarily work out that way. Later in the summa, when Aquinas comes to the topic of grace, he will discuss how this works in more detail and he will lay the foundations for the doctrines of efficacious grace and sufficient grace that follow from these aspects of God’s will.

Difficulties

• Article 3’s distinction between predestination and reprobation may seem an artificial construct to avoid the notion of double predestination. Indeed, Calvinists rejected this distinction and affirm that God does predestine the elect to glory and the rest to hell.
• In article 5, Aquinas concedes that we cannot know why God elects some but not others. He makes a strong argument that such election is not unjust, but perhaps the flavour of unfairness remains. The nature of God’s love for the reprobated remains one of the great mysteries.
• The argument of Article 7 depends on some elements of the creation being so key to the good of creation that God specifies them exactly and that other elements are not so important. For these latter, God knows them but his knowledge does not specify them exactly. For example, God specifies that there are enough of a species of animal for that species to flourish, but he does not specify the exact number of that species, leaving the latter to the playing out of secondary causes. This is another example of God creating necessary causes for some things and contingent causes for others.

Question 22 - God's Providence

Why this Question Matters.

In the next three questions, Aquinas turns to the subjects of providence and predestination. Given that God’s causality simply is what causes everything to be, it might seem that what He plans for creatures has an inevitability that removes all freedom from those creatures. Even more specifically, it would seem to reduce Christianity (or any other religion that recognizes God as first cause) to the playing out of an inevitable Fate. In this question, Aquinas concentrates on providence; that is, God’s plan for His creation. In following a strategy similar to that of Question 19, Aquinas has to tread a careful line between absolute determinism and total incoherence in his argument that God’s creative power enables His creation to play a true causal role in the unfolding of the plan that God has for it.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas asks whether it is appropriate to associate providence with God. Following a fairly well established pattern, the point of this question does not lie in a yes/no answer but in clarifying what we mean by providence when we use it in relation to God as opposed to other possible meanings. The answer is, of course, “yes”: God’s goodness is not only expressed in the creation of things and in His holding them in existence, but also in His ordering such created things to their end. When we talk about providence with respect to God, what we mean is the plan in God’s mind that orders all created things to their end. Aquinas goes on to connect this notion with the virtue of prudence because, humanly speaking, prudence is itself associated with the correct ordering of affairs. In the reply to the first objection, Aquinas quotes Aristotle to the effect that “prudence…commands what good deliberation well advises and what understanding correctly decides upon”. So there is a certain connection between prudence and providence in human affairs. When we consider God, however, we have to remember that this is an analogy and that He does not deliberate and that His act of understanding itself is creative of what is correct.

A2: If God’s providence were to extend to everything in the created world then there would seem to be a number of problems. How could anything occur by chance if everything was ordered by God’s providence? If God were providing for everything, how could misfortune befall anything? How could people make decisions for themselves if their lives were mapped out by providence? Aquinas simply reasserts that providence is God’s ordering of all created things to their ends and that God’s causation (being the first efficient causation) reaches to every secondary cause. In answer to the objection that chance would seem to be ruled out by universal providence, Aquinas points out that we consider events fortuitous or down to chance when particular causes are frustrated by other particular causes or when seemingly unrelated causes interact. Aquinas gives the example of two servants who meet by chance (as far as they are concerned) when carrying out the orders of a master who has foreseen their meeting by his intentionally sending them so they would meet. Particular causes may give the impression of chance to their agents, but from the point of view of the universal cause such chance events are foreseen. To the objection that misfortune and the occurrence of evil affecting individuals would seem to rule out universal providence, Aquinas points out the difference between particular and universal providence. Someone with care for an individual would indeed do their best for that individual, but one tasked with universal providence would preserve the good of the whole. Omelettes cannot be made without eggs being broken and lions cannot flourish without the death of their prey. Aquinas quotes Augustine: “Almighty God would in no way permit any evil in His works unless He were so good and powerful that He could bring good even out of evil”. In answer to the objection that free choice would seem to be incompatible with providence, Aquinas gives an answer that has some similarities with that of Question 19 Article 8 where the problem of reconciling contingency with the seeming necessity of things caused by God’s will is tackled. The very act of free choice itself goes back to the manner in which God’s causality acts. God’s providence assures the freeness of our particular choices that are themselves ordered to the end to which we are directed by God.

A3: God provides for everything but does He provide directly for everything? Were He to do so, it might seem to remove all causality from created things and would also seem, for example, to make God directly responsible for evil. To answer this, Aquinas distinguishes between providence and governance. The former involves the “idea or planned purpose” for things, the latter involves the execution of this planned purpose. Having made this distinction, Aquinas argues that God’s providence is universally direct but that his governance is executed indirectly through intermediaries (that is, the beings that He has created). As in Question 19, the idea here is that God acts as universal cause, laying out the plan for all creation but that as part of that creation he creates true secondary causes that execute that plan. Those causes are all ordered to their end though God’s provenance.

A4: Finally, Aquinas turns to the question of whether God’s providence imposes necessity on the things for which it provides. Given the answers to the last two articles, and Aquinas’s general overlying idea of created secondary causes acting under the providence of the primary cause, his answer that such necessity is not imposed on all things does not come as a surprise. Aquinas adapts and reiterates the teaching of Question 19 Article 8 that God’s providence prepares necessary causes for some effects, so that they come to be of necessity and that He prepares contingent causes for other things, so that they come to be contingently.


Difficulties

The idea that God prepares contingent causes (Article 4) is difficult to reconcile with what we might understand by contingency. See also Question 19.

Question 21 - God's Justice & Mercy

Why this Question Matters.

In Question 20 Aquinas introduced the idea of love in God. In treating of the topic, it became clear that the most important consideration was to understand the way in which we attribute love to God. We have to be careful with the meaning of terms applied to God and to man, understanding the analogies and dis-analogies in their uses. In this question Aquinas turns to the ideas of justice and mercy in God. In scripture and in the liturgy, these are terms that are sometimes applied to God in the same breath in which love is attributed to God, so it is not surprising that Aquinas follows the same strategy in this question as he did in the last. In asking whether there is justice and/or mercy in God, the answer is clear “yes”, but the substance of the question is really to understand what it means to attribute justice and mercy to God.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: As indicated above, Aquinas’s first task is to not really to answer the question “Is God just?” but rather to understand the way in which the term “justice” may be attributed to God. The objections focus on meanings and properties of the notion of justice that would seem to be incompatible with being an attribute of God. For example, justice is a part of the virtue of temperance (which is to do with the passions); justice would seem to circumscribe free action; justice is to do with rendering what is due to individuals. Each of these is prima facie incompatible with some property of God already described by Aquinas. In his answer, Aquinas identifies two types of justice: “commutative justice”, which is to do with agreements between people; and “distributive justice”, that deals with the distribution of what is due to people on the basis of merit (in its widest sense). We cannot attribute commutative justice to God (as there can be no proportion between God and man) but God’s justice is paradigmatically distributive justice, as “God bestows on everything what is proper to each”. In answer to the objections, Aquinas identified that some of the moral virtues are associated with the passions (and for these we must attribute such virtues to God only metaphorically) but others are associated with the will and these can be attributed (carefully) to God. Also, although justice might seem to circumscribe free action for humans, when we consider God it is better to consider His free action as willing what is just by definition. The objection that justice is about rendering what is due is based on the argument that God is a debtor to no creature. Aquinas identifies that God orders creation to Himself and that in doing so He gives to creatures what they need in order to fulfil their place in that order. In this sense, these things are due to creatures so that they can fulfil their natural function. However, we might also note that in giving creatures what they need in order to fulfil their natural order, God is honouring His own ordering of creation. In a sense, God is giving what is due to God rather than simply what is due to creatures.

A2: Aquinas now inquires into the relationship between truth and God’s justice. He recalls that truth is a matching between mind and reality (Question 16, Article 1) and observes that when the mind concerned is creative, the mind is the rule by which reality is judged but that when the mind is not creative the reverse holds. So for us, truth consists of a matching of our minds to things; for God, truth consists in things matching His mind. God’s justice orders things according to His wisdom and therefore we can consider God’s justice to be truth.

A3: Having dealt with justice, Aquinas now inquires into the nature of God’s mercy. Mercy might be seen as being an emotional response; it might also be seen as a relaxing (and therefore a falling short from) justice. These would suggest that God cannot be merciful. Aquinas answers that the “sadness” that we feel when we act mercifully is a result of the compassion that motivates mercy. God, of course, feels no sadness but He acts to drive away imperfections in creatures by the perfection of their goodness. In doing so when it might appear that such gifts are not due to people, God is not acting contrary to justice but acting beyond and above justice. If one pays back a debt, it is not unjust to add a gift to the repayment.

A4: Are justice and mercy simultaneously present in all of God’s works? Scripture might seem to provide examples where only one of these is present in specific circumstances. Similarly, suffering in this world may seem to give an example of injustice in God’s works. Aquinas answers that since God can do nothing that conflicts with His wisdom and goodness and that all that He does is in proportion to what he has ordered, everything He does, He does with justice. He also observes that everything that is due to a creature can be traced back ultimately to God’s will and, foundationally, God’s goodness maintains everything in existence. Therefore God’s mercy is present in all of His works insofar as He provides their very source by His goodness. If scripture sometimes speaks of a work of God as being simply a work of His justice, it is due to the fact that His justice is sometimes more evident in such works. For example, even in the damnation of the reprobate their punishment is sometimes softened by His mercy. Suffering in this world might appear unjust, but can still be seen to exhibit God’s justice and mercy insofar as through suffering people may be lifted closer to God.

Question 20 - God's Love

Why this Question Matters.

Love is fundamental and we know from scripture that God loves, that “God is love” even. However, given the picture of God that Aquinas has built up for us over the preceding questions, it is not entirely obvious what this means. In this question, Aquinas introduces the notion of love in God, relating it to God’s will.


The Thread of the Argument

A1: St John tells us that “God is love” so that asking, as this article does, whether God loves would seem rather strange. But as always, when we use terms about God the meaning of which we have derived from created reality, we must be careful about what is meant. The objections point out that love is a passion involving the capacity to be moved by another; but this makes no sense for God, who is unchanging. Similarly, we understand the attribution of grief or anger to God as being metaphors; why should we not simply consider love metaphorically of God? Aquinas answers that God must love simply because God has will! For any appetite (such as will) love is the first movement of that appetite towards the perceived good. Love is ordered to the good in general and is thus prior to all other movements of the will; such movements presuppose love. In humans, the rational appetite (the will) acts through sensitive appetites, therefore any act of the will is accompanied by corresponding bodily changes (e.g. the heart beats faster; adrenalin prepares the body for physical action). Because of these bodily changes we call movements of the sense appetites “passions”, but we do not apply this term to the movements of the will itself. Since God loves only through movement of the will, God loves without passion. We can speak of God’s love being passionate in a metaphorical way if we wish to, but used in the sense of the movement of the will we should speak of God’s love literally. Similarly, we think of love between humans as associated with each wanting the good for the other; in the case of God’s love for us we can still think in these terms if we remember that the good that God wills is nothing other than Himself. We are present to God in His knowledge; our being is because of His willing the good for us, in Him. Finally, we must note that God loves inasmuch as His will is creative, therefore God’s love extends to all of creation, not just to rational creatures.

A2: God wills some good to all existing things. Since loving something is the same as willing good to that thing, we see that God must love everything. But God’s love is not the same as our love because God’s will is creative. When we love someone, we are reacting to the goodness in that person and we are willing good for that person; but our love is not the direct cause of the good in that person. In contrast, God’s love “pours out and creates the goodness of things”. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite taught that love carries lovers outside themselves and transports them to their beloved. Clearly God is not transported outside Himself, but we can in some way say that He is in ecstasy (from the Greek ek-stasis; “standing outside”) in His creative love inasmuch as His love flows out to things. Love and hate for one object can co-exist insofar as the thing is loved in one respect and hated in another. So God loves sinners insofar as they are created things; but as sinners they are deficient and lack being in some way, and in that respect, God hates them.

A3: God loves everything, but does He love everything equally? Aquinas makes a distinction: The act of willing itself can admit degrees of intensity; the good which is willed can be for a greater or lesser good. Aquinas argues that in the first sense God’s love extends equally to all things; God loves everything by one simple act of will. However, in the second sense, God wills a greater good for some things than for others. In this sense, we can say that God loves some things more than others.

A4: Having shown that there is a sense in which God can be said to love some things more than others, Aquinas now passes to the question of whether he loves good things more than bad things. Given the preparation done so far, the answer to this question is almost immediate: God’s loving something more is nothing other than His willing more good upon that thing, therefore he loves good things more. The objections to this article list a number of instances, mostly scriptural, where it would seem that God has a “preferential option for the bad”. Aquinas’s answers to these objections show where each objection has missed certain key elements to arrive at misconception. The interesting exception to this pattern is the example of SS. Peter & John given in objection 3: it appears that St. Peter is better than St. John but equally it appears that Jesus loves St John more than St Peter. In his reply, Aquinas lists all the standard answers to this objection but then says that he thinks it to be “presumptuous to pronounce on all this” and that “the Lord is the weigher of spirits”. Aquinas appears to believe that here the interpretation of scripture is beyond human certainty.


Difficulties

• According to Aquinas, love is a movement of the will towards the good and its existence appears to be simply a corollary of the existence of will. When he talks about love in God, Aquinas can apply this notion of love to the movement of God’s will, neatly sidestepping some of the obvious problems that a naïve understanding of love applied to God would throw up. According to Aquinas, “God loves without passion”. This may be a challenge to many people! But here we have to remember how different God is to us and that we understand God through analogy with His creation. Inevitably some of the things we associate with love will not survive the analogy.
• In Article 2 Aquinas is willing to assert that there is sense in which God hates sinners (and in this he follows a distinct line of witness in scripture). We are very used to the slogan “Hate the sin but love the sinner” (somewhat akin to a saying of St. Augustine: “with love for mankind and hatred of sins”), so Aquinas may seem harsh here. But his approach recognizes a more sophisticated approach to love and hate in which they can co-exist under different aspects. A quick search around the web will reveal how much controversy the simple slogan arouses!

Question 19 - God's Will

Why this Question Matters.

Man is made in God’s image and therefore it seems reasonable to inquire as to how much we can infer about God by analogy with man. Aquinas has already talked about God’s intellect in his discussion of knowledge in God, so it quite reasonable for him now to consider whether God has a will and if so, how we are to understand it. That God has a will appears to be affirmed by Scripture; but are we to take this as a literal description or as a metaphor? How also do we reconcile the contingency of events within creation with the will of an infinitely powerful being, the fulfilment of which would seem to be inevitable?


The Thread of the Argument

A1: Aquinas devotes the first article to the fundamental question of whether God has a will. If we work by analogy with certain aspects of human willing, this might seem problematic. In humans, will is associated with aiming at some good or with desire for something not possessed, and is at the very least associated with changing some state of affairs for some perceived better state of affairs. Since God is pure actuality, these would be problematic for such a notion of will in God. Scripture, of course, talks of God’s will and of God’s willing certain things, so how are these reconciled? Aquinas affirmation that God has a will is based on an argument that intellect and will necessarily co-exist in a rational mind. Since God is rational and has an intellect, He must therefore also have a will. In support of this argument, Aquinas recalls that physical things have existence through their form and that they tend to the possession of that form if they don’t fully possess it and they rest in it when they do. In a similar way when a mind understands something by possession of its intelligible form, it perceives it as a good to be gained (insofar as it is a good) and tends towards that good. The will simply is this appetite for the perceived good. (The will is sometimes referred to as the “rational appetite”). Replying to the objections, Aquinas argues that the notion of willing is not restricted to unattained things. The aim of God’s will is Himself; His desiring is His love and delight for Himself.

A2: The answer to the first article may leave us with the impression that God’s will is entirely focussed inwardly and that therefore God does not will things other than Himself. Aquinas’s answer to this is based on one of his most profound and beautiful axioms: “good is diffusive of itself”. Things in nature not only have a natural tendency towards their own good but they also spread their own good to other things. For example, animals not only tend towards their own perfection, but they reproduce, spreading their own good to new beings. We know God through his creation, so we may infer that this axiom applies to creation because it applies primarily to God Himself. We may apply this axiom to wills and willing: wills share their good with others and this latter applies pre-eminently to God’s will. In reply to the potent objection that will is stirred, and therefore changed, by what is willed, Aquinas replies that God wills things other than Himself in willing His own goodness. This is parallel to the argument that God understands things other than Himself in understanding His own essence.

A3: Since God is eternal and unchangeable, it might seem in consequence that everything He wills is willed necessarily. For if His will were contingent and truly open to alternatives, this would imply change in God (at the point at which the choice between alternatives occurs) as well as imperfection (as everything contingent has not achieved full actuality). Aquinas answers by making a technical distinction between “absolute necessity” and “hypothetical necessity” in propositions. In the former the relationship between the terms of the proposition guarantee its truth (e.g. “a human being is an animal”); in the latter the proposition is true as it affirms an actual current state of affairs (“Socrates is sitting” is true if Socrates is actually sitting now). Aquinas now argues that God does will His own goodness with absolute necessity, but that there are other things that He wills with hypothetical necessity. To do this, Aquinas notes that God wills things other than Himself “insofar as they are set towards His goodness as to their end”. In other words, all things being ordered towards God as their end are actually ordered towards God’s goodness. He notes that some things that lead to an end are necessary for achieving that end and that some that actually occur are not (but are contingently open to alternatives). Applying this to God’s goodness as final end, we conclude that God must will with absolute necessity the former class and with hypothetical necessity the latter class. So, God wills things necessarily insofar as “He wills what He wills”, but not all that He wills is willed with absolute necessity.

A4: We know that God causes all things in the sense of a first cause, but does it make sense to attribute God’s causality to His will? Or is it, as the objections suggest, more fitting to attribute God’s causality to his essence or to his knowledge (as might be suggested by the conclusion of Q14 Article 8)? Aquinas offers three arguments that God’s will is the cause of things. The first argument is based on the definition of will as rational appetite: the will is what gets things done based on the knowledge of the intellect. In creation, any physical agent is preceded by an intelligent agent and since God is first agent, His agency precedes any other. He has intellect and will and therefore He “gets things done” through His will. The second argument attacks the idea that God’s causality proceeds from His nature by arguing that natures act as agents in one single determinate way, the way that is natural to them. But God’s nature is not like the natures of created things; the whole perfection of being is contained in God’s nature and therefore it is not ordered to one determinate thing. The analogy between God’s nature and created natures breaks down before we can claim natural causation associated with God’s nature. The third argument mirrors the first in arguing that effects pre-exist in their causes and therefore creatures pre-exist in God’s understanding. They proceed from this pre-existence in His understanding by His will, as will is the faculty of the mind that tends towards the good perceived.

A5: God is the first cause, so it makes little sense to talk of His causing being caused by something else. But can we look for causal structure in God’s will, attributing cause to certain acts of His will due to other acts of His will? If there were no cause behind all of God’s willed actions one might begin to think of God as capricious or even irrational! To answer this question, Aquinas considers a certain aspect of how minds work. Sometimes, he claims, we understand a premise and draw a conclusion from it as separate acts. Other times we grasp both a premise and conclusion together in a single act of intuition. In the latter case we do not say that understanding of the premise causes understanding of the conclusion but we do in the former case. The will behaves in a similar fashion with respect to ends and means. If end and means are grasped in one act, then we do not say that willing the end causes the willing of the means. God, of course, wills everything in His Goodness in a single act, therefore His willing of an end cannot be said to be a cause of His willing the corresponding means. Hence Aquinas concludes that He does not will this because He wills that but rather that He wills this to be because of that.

A6: We might initially think that God’s will must of necessity be fulfilled; after all, whatever could frustrate it? But St. Paul famously wrote that “God wills everyone to be saved and to come to know the truth”, but things do not turn out that way, implying that God’s will can be frustrated. Aquinas affirm that God’s will is inevitably fulfilled, but in doing so he also reaffirms the classical notions of “antecedent will” and "consequent will” in his reply to the objection concerning the failure of universal salvation. He starts by drawing a parallel between formal and efficient causes. A thing can fail to have a particular form, but it cannot fail to have a form. Likewise something can fail to have a particular efficient cause but it must still have a cause subsumed under the universal first cause. No effect can escape from being under the sway of the universal cause. Therefore, as the universal cause of all things, God’s will must be fulfilled; if His will appears to be frustrated from one point of view, it is in fact fulfilled from another point of view. To understand the difference between antecedent and consequent will, Aquinas gives the example that it is good in general that people should live and bad for them to die. However, if they turn out to be murderers then it is good that they should be killed. (Our modern sensibilities might wish to replace Aquinas’s example with freedom and incarceration rather than life and execution!) An antecedent will is a sort of willing that is expressed prior to considering all the facts of a particular situation. When all those facts are taken into account, a judgement is expressed in consequent willing. So, the classical tradition is that St Paul’s words are expressing God’s antecedent will rather than His consequent will, where His justice and mercy will be in balance according His revealed promises.

A7: From certain passages of scripture it might seem that God’s will is changeable. However, there are also other scriptural passages that assert that God’s will is unchangeable. How are we to understand this? Aquinas, as one might expect by now, is firmly on the side of the teaching that God’s will is unchanging. He notes first of all that there is a substantial difference between changing one’s will and willing change. One must also note that even in humans an unchanging will can will contrary things to happen in different circumstances. Aquinas explains those scriptural passages that seem to assert a change in God’s will as invoking metaphor or as, in the words of Gregory the Great, “God changes his sentence, but not His plan”. Things can appear to us as changing when they are in fact unchanging as far as God is concerned.

A8: Aquinas asked whether God wills necessarily in Article 2. He now returns to the question of necessity in God’s will in an article related to the subject of article 6: Does God’s will impose necessity on the things He wills? If this were so, then it would appear that any notion of contingency or of free choice would disappear. Aquinas claims that God’s will sometimes imposes necessity on the things He wills and sometimes it does not. In defending this position, Aquinas rejects a common argument that says that effects are necessary when God uses necessary secondary causes and are contingent when He uses contingent secondary causes (recall his argument in Article 6 that God’s will is always inevitable fulfilled). Instead, Aquinas argues the other way around. As God’s will is the most effective of all causes, God can not only will things to be but can also will the way in which they come to be. Thus in designing the universe, God has ordered necessary causes for some effects and contingent causes for other effects.

A9: In Question 14 Article 10, Aquinas tackled the awkward question of God’s knowledge of evil. There he had to deal with the objection that as God’s knowledge is creative, it might seem that God must therefore create evil. Now Aquinas turns his attention to the question of whether God wills evil. Again, the naive challenge here is that God is responsible for everything and that everything that is has resulted from His will, therefore it would seem that He must will the evils that are present in creation. Aquinas argues (from Question 5 Article 1) that as evil is the opposite of the good, it is impossible that any evil can be directly wanted, be it by the natural appetite, animal appetite or by the rational appetite that is the will. However, it is possible for evil to be willed indirectly when the evil corresponds in some natural way to a greater good. For example, a lion killing a deer to eat involves the evil of death but the evil is associated with the good of the flourishing of the lion. God never wills moral evil but He wills physical evil indirectly by willing the good with which it is associated.

A10: Does God have free choice? Article 3 argued that God wills His own good of necessity but that the other things He wills are only willed with a hypothetical necessity. God clearly has choice over willing these latter things. Now God cannot choose moral evil (as argued in Article 9) but this is, by definition, a turning away from the good and is therefore consistent with God’s free choice over hypothetical necessities.

A11: We can often infer a state of mind in someone from their behaviour. For example, it is often reasonable to infer that someone is angry if they punish their child. We can also sometimes infer someone’s will from what they do or say. We say that the behaviour is a sign of the underlying state of mind. Can we do the same with God’s will? Can we infer God’s will from some of the signs that He gives? Aquinas argues that we can, but he also warns that we often use metaphor in the inference, as God is in many ways quite unlike the way we are. For example, scripture talks of God being angry and of God’s wrath; these are metaphorical applications to God of human emotions which point to some underlying reality. God issues commands from which we may reasonably infer God’s will. There is a difference between these examples: we attribute anger to God metaphorically but sometimes we can attribute willing to God literally. Indeed, we have to be careful in our inference, distinguishing literal willing of God (His “will of good pleasure”) from a metaphorical attribution (a “will of sign”).

A12: Having argued for the possibility of inferring God’s will from signs, Aquinas now proposes five particular signs that are amenable to such inference. He arrives at these signs by analogy with human willing. If you want something done, then doing it yourself, or getting it done by someone else expresses your will; therefore doing is sign of will. If you give permission for something to be done, that is a sign of your will. Likewise prohibiting something indicates your will on the matter. We might direct others through an imperative precept or through an advisory council. Aquinas argues that the analogy with human willing is valid by an appeal to the Lord’s Prayer and to an argument of Augustine.


Handy Concepts

• The will is the “rational appetite” corresponding to the intellect. The intellect perceives something as a good to be desired and proposes it as such to the will. The will takes this proposal as its object and moves towards it in a fashion parallel to the way our other appetites move towards their objects.
• “Appetites” can be rational (as with the will) or can be “sensitive” (corresponding to the senses). The term is also applied to non-living things in that they tend towards their perfection. So, in article 1, Aquinas states that “When cognition is absent we call this bearing ‘natural appetite’”.
• In the second objection to Article 5, Aquinas touches on the idea that God is the immediate cause of all things in the created world through His will. This idea became popular in some branches of Islamic philosophy.
• For Aquinas, intellect precedes the will (i.e. the intellect identifies an object for the will as a perceived good and the will tends towards that object). Later medieval philosophers argued for the primacy of the will. This led to the idea of voluntarism (which some consider one of the formative ideas behind the Reformation).

Difficulties

• Articles 6 & 8 together seem puzzling. God’s will is always fulfilled and God orders necessary effects through necessary causes and contingent effects through contingent causes. How does this work? Does Aquinas’s use of the word “contingent” really make any sense? What does it mean to say that God can will the manner (necessary or contingent) in which things come about? How can God “prepare contingent causes”? He will return to this theme in Q 22 on God’s providence.