Part V: God as the Beginning of Things

Part V: God as the Beginning of Things

Part V God as the Beginning of Things Passage 27 Creation as God's Doing Source: Thomas's public disputations on the Power of God, 3.1-3.

Text from Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (Marietti edn., Turin, 1953), with corrections from the Leonine text in preparation.

Date: 1265-7, Italy, aged 40.

Type of passage and how to read:

Disputed question (see Introduction).

Notes on translation:

In Article 2 'change' translates mutatio, 'passage' transitus, 'alteration' motus, 'modification' alteratio.

Parallel passages: Thomas here, especially in Article 3, presupposes Aristotle's views on action, discussed above in Passage 5. It is because Aristotle has said that all action takes place in the things agents act on that Thomas asks whether creation takes place in creatures.

[Question 3] The subject for debate is Creation—the first effect of God's power.

{Article 1] And in the first place we are asked: Can God make something from nothing?

For [1] God can't do something that contradicts our most general mental conceptions: he can't make a whole smaller than some part of it. But Aristotle' says it is a general conception and maxim of philosophers that nothing can be made from nothing. So God can't make something from nothing.

Moreover, [2] everything that comes to exist was able to exist before it existed; for what couldn't exist couldn't come God as the Beginning of Things to be: nothing moves towards the impossible. But the ability of something to exist must itself exist in some subject— or perhaps itself be a subject—for no property can exist without a subject. So whatever comes to be must come to be from matter or a subject; nothing can come to be from nothing...

Moreover, [4] Aristotle? says the totally unlike doesn't act on the totally unlike: what acts and what is acted on must agree in genus and in material. But unqualified non-being agrees with God in nothing. So God can't act on unqualified nonbeing, and so can't make something from nothing.

But it was said [by the respondent] that this argument holds only when the activity of an agent is not its substance and so needs to be received into some subject.

But against that, [5] Ibn Sina? says that if heat was robbed of its material it would act of itself without its material; yet heat's activity is not its substance. So you can't say it is because God's activity is his substance that he doesn't need material.

Moreover, [6] nothing can be inferred from nothing, and inference is reason's way of bringing things into being. Now reason models itself on nature. So in nature too nothing can come to be from nothing.

Moreover, [7] if something comes to be from nothing, the preposition from must denote either cause or relationship.

The causes it denotes seem to be either agency or material, but what doesn't exist can't be either the agent or the material of what does; so here from doesn't denote a cause.

But neither can it denote relationship, for, as Boethius* says, being doesn't relate to non-being. So there is no way something can be made from nothing...

Moreover, [10] what is made from nothing exists after not existing; so there was some last moment of non-existence when it ceased not existing, and some first moment of existence when it began to exist. These moments are either the same or different. If the same, then two contradictories coexisted at the same moment; if different, then, since the Creation as God's Doing two moments can only be separated by time, there must be some state of things midway between affirmation and negation: for a thing can't not exist after its last moment of non-existence, nor exist before its first moment of existence.

But both things are impossible—contradictories can neither coexist nor have a between state. So it is impossible for something to come to be from nothing.

Moreover, [11] what is made must have been made at some moment, and what is created must have been created at some moment. So was the creature made and being made at the same moment or at different ones? How can one say at different ones? For before it is made no creature exists, so if its being made pre-existed its madeness, there would have to be some other subject of the being made, and that goes against the notion of creation. If, however, the thing was made and being made at the same moment, then it was not being made and being made at the same moment; for what is already made stably exists whereas what is being made does not yet exist. So the whole thing is impossible and something cannot be made from nothing or created...

[1] A gloss on Genesis 1 [1]: In the beginning God created heaven and earth, says that create means make something from nothing. So God can make something from nothing.

Moreover, [2] Ibn Sina* says that only agents that are incidentally active need material to act on. But God isn't incidentally active: his activity is his very substance. So he doesn't need material to act on, and can make something from nothing...

We must firmly maintain that God can make something from nothing and did.

To be clear on this, note that activity flows from actuality, so that the way an agent acts is determined by the way it has actual existence. Now things in nature have actuality which is partial, in two senses of the word. Firstly, relative to themselves, since not all their substance is actual: they are

God as the Beginning of Things made of formed material, and as a result, they don't act with the whole of themselves but through the form that gives them their actual existence. Secondly, relative to all that actually exists, since nothing in nature contains every actual perfection actually existing in things: the actuality of each is determined to one species of one genus, and, as a result, none is an agent of being as such but only of this being as this being, determinately of this or that species. For what things do reflects what they are, so that the activity of agents in nature doesn't produce being without qualification but determines already existent being in this or that way, for example, to be fire or to be white or something similar. And this is why agents in nature act by causing change, and so need matter as a subject for change or for the actuality [they bring about], and so cannot make something from nothing.

God himself on the other hand is totally actual both relative to himself (since he is pure actuality unalloyed with any potentiality) and relative to actually existent things (since every perfection of being is found in him as in the first and fullest beginning of things). As a result he, by his action, produces the whole substance of things, presupposing nothing but rather being himself the source of all existence with the whole of himself. And this is why he can make something from nothing, an activity of his which is called creation. And so we read in the book of Causes® that existence is created, but life and the rest formed: for the causing of being, unqualified, is traced back to the first universal cause, whilst the causing of anything over and above being or specifying it is attributed to secondary causes, which act by forming so to speak the presupposed effect of the universal cause. And so too nothing can give existence except by sharing God's power; which is why the same book" says that the excellent soul possesses the divine activity of giving existence.

Hence: to 1: Aristotle calls nothing can be made from nothing a general conception or opinion of natural philosophers because the agents they observe in nature act by causing

Creation as God's Doing change, and that needs a subject capable of changing. But, as we have said, an agent outside nature doesn't need this. to 2: Before the world existed it was able to come to be, but that doesn't mean some pre-existing material possessed that ability; for, as Aristotle® says, sometimes we call something possible not because of any ability, but because the proposition expressing it contains no contradiction in terms, possible here meaning not impossible. So we say: Before the world existed it was possible for it to come to be, since subject and predicate in that proposition do not contradict one another. Alternatively, one can say that the possibility is founded on an ability, that of an active agent not of a passive material. Aristotle himself, when talking of generation in nature," uses this argument against the Platonists, who had said separate forms could cause generation in nature... to 4: When something is made from nothing, the nothing— non-being—is not a sort of passive contributor to the making but a sort of opposite to what the making makes.

Even in natural changes there is an oppositeness which doesn't passively contribute, though there it is incidental to a passively contributing subject. to 5: If heat was robbed of its material it would act without the material through which it acts, but not without the material on which it acts. to 6: Reasoned inference resembles natural change inasmuch as it moves from one thing to another; and so just as all natural change starts from something, so also all reasoned inference. But just as the understanding of the principles from which the inference starts is not itself inferred from anything, so creation—the beginning of every change—is not creation from anything. to 7: Saying something comes to be from nothing has two senses, as Anselm'° points out, for the negation in the word nothing can either deny the preposition from or be governed by it. If it denies the preposition there are a further two senses. In the first both preposition and verb are denied, so that saying something comes to be from nothing means it

God as the Beginning of Things doesn't come to be at all (like saying a non-talker is talking of nothing); and in this sense we might say—though it's an odd turn of phrase—that God comes to be from nothing because he doesn't come to be at all.

In a second sense the negation negates the preposition but the verb remains affirmed, so that saying something comes to be from nothing means it comes to be but not from anything pre-existent (like saying someone sad without cause is heartsick for nothing); and in this sense everything created comes to be from nothing.

If, however, the preposition governs the negation there are again two senses, one true and one false. The false sense takes the preposition to denote a cause, for there is no way non-being can cause being. The true sense takes the preposition to denote only a relationship, so that saying something comes to be from nothing means it comes to be after nothing; and this is also true of creation. When

Boethius says being doesn't relate to non-being, he must mean that no determinate proportion or real relationship can exist between being and non-being, as Ibn Sina! says... to 10: When something comes to be from nothing it starts to exist at some moment; and at that moment its non-existence ceases to exist. In fact there was no real moment at which non-existence did exist, but only imaginary ones: for just as there isn't real space outside the universe, but one we imagine when we say God could make something at suchand-such a distance from the universe, so there wasn't real time before the universe began, but one we imagine when we talk of a last moment of non-being. And so the two moments

[the first moment of being and the last moment of non-being] don't exist in the same time, since real and imaginary time are not continuous with one another. to 11: What is made from nothing is made and being made at the same moment. And this is no different from any instantaneous change: the air, for instance, is lit up and being lit up at the same moment. For in such changes the very madeness is called being made at its first moment of madeness. Alternatively we can say.that when something is made from nothing we talk of it being made at that time not because it is moving from one state to another, but because

Creation as God's Doing of the outflow from agent into effect. Both occur when nature generates things (namely, passage from one state to another, and outflow from agent into effect), but only the latter properly exists in creation...

[Article 2] And in the second place we are asked: Is creation a sort of change?

For [1] according to Aristotle'? the word change means this existing after that. This fits creation, in which existence comes after non-existence. So creation is a change.

Moreover, [2] everything that comes to be comes to be from non-existence in a sense, since what exists doesn't have to come to be. So the relationship that generation (in which a thing receives [form,] a part of its substance) bears to formlessness (qualified non-being), creation

(in which a thing receives the whole of its substance) bears to unqualified nonbeing. So since formlessness is properly speaking one extreme of generation, unqualified non-being is properly speaking one extreme of creation, and creation therefore properly speaking a change...

Moreover, [4] what is not now as it was earlier has changed.

But what is created is not now as it was earlier, for first it did not exist (in the unqualified sense) and later it came to exist.

So what is created has changed.

Moreover, [5] what was potential and is now actual has changed. But created things were potential and are now actual, since before creation they existed only in the power of their maker and now actually exist. So created things have changed, and creation is therefore a change.

Aristotle'? lists six kinds of change, and they don't include creation, as you can verify by going through them all. So creation is not a change.

In every change the extremes of the change have to have something in common. For if nothing connected the opposing God as the Beginning of Things extremes we couldn't talk of one passing into the other (the words change and passage both refer to some same thing being differently disposed now from earlier). Again, unless they referred to the same subject, these extremes wouldn't exclude one another as is required of extremes of a change: for two opposites referring to different subjects can coexist.

Sometimes then the extremes of a change have one actually existent subject in common, giving rise to alterations in the strict sense: modifications of quality, increase and decrease of quantity, and change of place, all of which are alterations in which one and the same actually existent subject changes from one of two opposed extremes to another. Sometimes, however, the subject common to both extremes is not actually existent but something only existing potentially, as happens when things are generated or destroyed in an absolute sense: for the subject of the form which makes a thing exist as a substance (or of the lack of such a form) has to be some ultimate matter which [of itself] doesn't exist actually; so that generation and destruction are changes but not alterations strictly speaking. Sometimes, however, there is no common subject actually or potentially existing, but only a single continuous time in the first part of which one opposite exists and in the second part another, as when one thing is said to come from another in the sense of coming after it like afternoon from morning; and this is change not properly but metaphorically, inasmuch as we imagine time itself to be a sort of subject of what happens in time.

Now in creation nothing is common in any of the above ways: for there is no common subject either actually or potentially existing, and, if we are talking of the creation of the universe, no common time, since before the world there was no time. The only thing in common is imaginary: a single common time imagined to exist before and after the world was made; for just as no real space exists outside the universe though we can imagine one, so no time existed before the world began though we can imagine one. And for this reason creation truly and properly speaking is not a change, though it can be imagined to be one, not properly but metaphorically.

Creation as God's Doing Hence: to 1: The word change means this existing after that in some same subject, as we have said, and this doesn't fit creation. to 2: In generation, in which a thing receives part of its substance, there exists—though not actually—a subject common to form and formlessness, so that the words extreme and passage properly apply; but this is not true of creation, as we have said... to 4: What is not now as it was earlier has changed, given persistence of a subject; otherwise what has no existence at all would change, since what has no existence at all neither exists now as it did earlier nor not now as it did earlier. For change some same thing must be not now as it was earlier. to 5: The subject of a change is some potential to be acted on, not the agent's power to act; so what was potential of being acted on and is now actual has changed, but not what was in someone's active power and is now actual; so the objection is invalid.

[Article 3] And in the third place we are asked: Does creation name something real in creatures, and if so what?

And it seems it is not anything real in creatures:

For [1], as the book of Causes'* says: what is received into anything exists there in the way the recipient exists. But, since in creation God makes things out of nothing, what receives his creative action doesn't exist at all. Creation then can't be something really existing in the creature.

Moreover, [2] everything real is either creator or creature.

But creation is not the creator, because then it would have existed eternally; nor is it a creature, because then it would have been created by another creation, which would then itself have needed creating, and so on ad infinitum. So creation is not something real.

Moreover, [3] whatever exists is either substance or incidental property. Now creation. is not a substance, since it is neither matter nor form nor anything combined from the two, as is easy to see. Nor is it an incidental property,

God as the Beginning of Things because properties follow on their subjects but creation is prior in nature to its only possible subject, the thing created.

So creation is not anything real...

Moreover, [6] if creation signifies some relatedness of the creature to the God who gives it being, since this relatedness is always there in creatures and not just when they start existing, that means there is not only creation when a thing starts to be but as long as it goes on existing, so that things are being continually created, which seems absurd. Creation then is not a relatedness {in creatures], and we are led to the same conclusion as before...

[1] If creation isn't real then nothing is really created, and that appears to be false. So creation must be something real.

Moreover, [2] God is master of what he creates because by creating them he brought them into being. Now mastery implies a real relatedness [to God] of creatures. A fortiori creation.

According to some people creation is something real existing between creator and creatures, and, since what lies between is neither one extreme nor the other, creation would then be neither creator nor creature. But the masters [of theology] have pronounced this mistaken, since whatever exists, in whatever manner, must get its existence from God and so be a creature. So other people say that creation itself is not anything real on the side of creatures: but this too doesn't seem acceptable, for wherever there are things related in such a way that one depends on the other but not vice versa, we find the dependent one related really and the other related only notionally, as Aristotle'> says is the case of knowledge and what is known. Now the very word creature relates it to a creator; and the creature depends on the creator but not vice versa; so creatures must have a real relationship to the creator, but God a notional relationship only. And this Peter

Lombard'® says explicitly.

So one must say that creation can be understood actively Creation as God's Doing or passively: actively it denotes God's activity—which is his substance—as related to creatures, not really but only notionally; passively creation is not something in the category of passion—because, as we have said earlier, creation is not properly speaking a change—but something in the category of relationship. And we can explain this as follows.

In all true changes two processes occur: one goes from one extreme of the change to the other, from white to black, for example; and the other goes from agent to what is acted on, from the maker to what is made. Now both these processes feature differently during the change and at its end. During change what is changing is distancing itself from one extreme and approaching the other, but at the end of change what was changing has already started to exist at the last extreme; for clearly something changing from white to black is no longer approaching black at the end of the change but has already started being black. In the same way what the agent acts on or makes is undergoing transmutation by the agent during change, but at the end ceases to undergo transmutation by the agent and takes up the relationship of being from the agent, resembling it in certain respects; what humans generate, for example, takes up at birth the relationship of child. Now we have already said that creation shouldn't be understood as some process preceding the end of change, but as something characterizing what is already made. So creation as such doesn't imply any process of approaching being or any undergoing of transmutation by the creator, but simply a starting to exist, and [consequently] a relatedness to the creator from whom this existence comes.

So creation is really nothing other than a relatedness to God consequent on starting to be.

Hence: to 1: In creation it is not non-being that receives God's action but what is created, as we have said. to 2: Understood as an action, creation is God's substance understood as bearing a certain relationship [to creatures], and is thus something uncreated. Understood as going on in creatures, as we have said, creation is in reality a certain

God as the Beginning of Things relatedness [of creatures] conceived as a change because of the beginning or novelty implied. Now this relatedness is in a certain sense something created, if that word means something come from God. But there is no need to go on ad infinitum, because the relatedness of creation is not referred to God by some further real relatedness, but in itself: relationships, as Ibn Sind?" says, don't need further relationships to relate them. And if we understand the word created strictly, as applying only to subsistent things—made and created in a strict sense because only they exist in a strict sense—then the relationship we are talking of is not something created but con-created. For properly speaking it does not exist but rather belongs in existence as all incidental properties do. to 3: This relatedness is an incidental property, and as existent, inherent in a subject, is posterior to the thing created in the way all incidental properties are, really and notionally; though it is not the sort of incidental property that the subject itself can cause. But if we look at what defines this particular relationship—namely, that it is something arising from an agent's action—then it is in a certain sense prior to its subject, in the way its immediate cause, God's own action, is...

. to 6: Creation implies the relationship we are talking of together with newness of existing, so that even though things are always related to God it doesn't follow that they're being created as long as they go on existing. Though there's nothing unacceptable in saying that as long as creatures exist this comes from God, just as as long as the air is lit up this comes from the sun, as Augustine'® also pointed out. Here the difference is only one of words, depending on whether the word creation implies newness of existing or not...

Did Creation Occur in Time?

Passage 28 Did Creation Occur in Time?

Source: Thomas's public disputations on the Power of God, 3.17.

Text from Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (Marietti edn., Turin, 1953), with corrections from the Leonine text in preparation.

Date: 1265-7, Italy, aged 40.

Type of passage and how to read:

Disputed question (see Introduction).

[Question 3] The subject for debate is Creation—the first effect of God's power.

, ..+ [Article 17] And in the seventeenth place we are asked:

Has the world always existed?

For [1] what characterizes a thing always accompanies it. But pseudo-Dionysius' says that it is characteristic of God's goodness to call existent things to communion with him, that is, to give creatures existence. So, since God was always good, it seems he must always have given creatures existence; and the world must always have existed...

Moreover, [6] what stays the same will go on doing the same until stopped. Now God always stays the same—you never alter, says Psalm 101 [28]—and because of his unlimited power what he does can't be stopped. So it seems he must always go on doing the same; and thus, since he produced a world once, it seems he must always have been producing it...

Moreover, [10] if the world didn't always exist, then before it existed it was either possible or not. If it wasn't possible, then its existence was impossible and its non-existence necessary and it never was brought into existence. But if it was possible, then a potentiality for a world existed, and that _ means some subject or material existed, since potentialities can't exist without something to be potential. But if material

God as the Beginning of Things existed it existed under a form, since altogether formless material can't exist. So something composed of material and form existed, and consequently a whole universe...

Moreover, [12] any agent that newly starts to act changes from being able to act to actually acting. Now God can't do that, since he is altogether unchanging. So it seems he can't have newly started to act but must have produced the world from eternity ...

Moreover, [15] what is always beginning and ending never begins or ends, since things exist after beginning and before ending. But time is always beginning and ending, since the only part of time that exists is the present moment, which ends the past and begins the future. So time never begins and never ends but always exists, and the same must be true of change, and of what changes, and so of the whole world; for time can't exist without change, nor change without what changes, nor what changes without the world.

But [the respondent] said that the first moment of time didn't end a past, and that its last moment won't begin a future.

[16] what differentiates the temporal present from the eternal present is that it passes. But what passes passes from one state to another. So all moments must pass from an earlier to a later state. So there can't be either a first moment or a last...

Moreover, [20] God, who is prior in nature to the world, is either prior to it also in duration or not. If not, then he resembles those causes that have effects of equal duration to themselves, and it would seem that creatures must have existed from all eternity as God has. But if God is prior in duration to the world, then there must have been a duration prior to the world's duration relating to it as early to late.

But duration that has early and late in it is time. So time preexisted the world, and thus change and what changes; and we have reached the same conclusion as before...

Moreover, [25] if time started to exist, did that take time or was it instantaneous? Not instantaneous because in an instant no time as yet exists; nor did it take time, for since

Did Creation Occur in Time? nothing exists before it begins to exist, no time could have existed until the time [of its beginning] ended. So time didn't start to exist, and we are led to the same conclusion as before.

[1] Proverbs 8 [24] represents God's wisdom as saying:

There was not yet a deep when I was conceived, no springs brimming over with water; before the great mass of the mountains was settled, before the hills I came to birth; when as yet he had made neither earth nor rivers nor the hinges on which earth turns. So earth and rivers and the hinges on which earth turns did not exist for ever.

Moreover, [2] Priscian tells us that as time goes by people get cleverer. But since cleverness isn't limitless, the time during which cleverness has been growing can't be limitless either; nor can the world.

Moreover, [3] Job 14 [19] says cloudbursts wear away the earth, But there isn't unlimited earth. So if limitless time has passed, the earth would have disappeared already; which is clearly false.

Moreover, [4] everyone agrees that God is prior in nature to the world as cause to effect. But in God nature and duration are the same. So God is prior to the world in duration, and the world has not existed for ever.

We must firmly maintain that the world has not always existed: catholic faith teaches it and no scientific proof can succeed in proving the opposite. To be clear on this, note... that God's actions are determined neither by his material nor by the power available to him nor by some ultimate goal, but only by the form at which his activity is aimed, for this, once presupposed, requires things to exist in a way conformable to that form.

Now we must distinguish the production of an individual creature from the coming out of the whole universe from God. When talking of the production of an individual

God as the Beginning of Things creature we can say it is as it is because of some other creature or at least because of the order of the universe which all creatures serve as parts do the form of a whole. But when we talk of the bringing into existence of the whole universe, there is no other created thing which can be used to explain why the universe is as it is; and since its arrangements aren't determined by the power available to God— which is infinite—or by his goodness—which would be there even without such things—we must say they depend simply on its maker's will.

If you want to know why the heavens are so big and not bigger, the only answer is that he who made it wanted it that size. And that, according to Moses Maimonides, is why scripture urges us to look at the stars, since their order above all shows how everything is subject to the will and providence of the creator. There is no answer to the question why this star is that far from that star—or any other such question about the order of the heavens—except that God planned it so in his wisdom. And so Isaiah 40 [26] says: Lift up your eyes to the heavens; consider who created them. It won't help to say that such and such is the size appropriate to the nature of heavens or heavenly bodies in the way every solid thing has a size fixed by nature, for just as God's power isn't limited to this size rather than that, so it isn't limited to a nature requiring this size rather than one requiring that. So we will have to ask the same question about the nature as we asked about the size, even if we concede that the nature of the heavens requires this size and can't have any other one.

Not even this can be said about time and its duration. For time is as extrinsic to things as place is; so that even heavens which can't have another size or other intrinsic properties than the ones they have can still occupy a different place and position by moving in space, or even a different time; for time succeeds time for ever as movement follows movement and place place, and one can't say, as we said of size, that the nature of the heavens demand this time not that or this place not that. Clearly then it is simply a matter of God's will what length of time the universe lasts, just as its size is. And so there is no proving necessary anything about the universe's

Did Creation Occur in Time? duration, as one would have to do to prove the world always existed.

But some people, because they didn't think of the universe as issuing from God, wereforced into errors about the world's beginning. Some of the earlier cosmologists, overlooking agent causes and postulating an uncreated matter as a cause of everything, were forced into saying matter had always existed. For nothing can bring itself into existence from non-existence and to begin existing would need some other cause. These cosmologists believed that the world always existed, either continuously (since the only agents they knew of were those in nature with fixed effects which necessarily go on doing the same thing) or discontinuously in the way Democritus believed the world—or rather worlds— to have been built up and broken down many times by chance, by the random movements of atoms. But because it didn't seem right that all the agreements and usefulnesses that occur in nature—always or practically always—should come from chance, as they would have to do if all there is is matter, and especially since certain effects can't be explained by the causality of matter, other people postulated an agent cause: mind for Anaxagoras, attraction and repulsion for Empedocles. These people didn't think of such agents as causes of the universe, but as particular causes acting on matter to change it from one thing to another. So they were forced to say that matter was eternal (having no cause of its existence) but that the world began: for any agent causing by way of change must temporally precede its effect, since the effect comes only at the end of the change, and that comes after the beginning of the change, at which time the agent must already be present to begin the change. Aristotle," however, realized that if the cause you postulated for setting up the world acted through change, an infinite regress would result, for every change would have to have another one preceding it; so he thought the world always existed. He wasn't talking about a universe issuing from a God, but about agents that started acting by changing, in the way particular causes do, though not the universal one. As a result he argued to the eternity of the world from change and God as the Beginning of Things the first mover's lack of change. So if you think about this carefully you will see his reasons are reasons attacking a position: which is why, having raised the question of the eternity of change, he begins® with the opinions of Anaxagoras and Empedocles that he intends to attack. Those who came after Aristotle did reflect on the issuing of the whole universe from God by an act of will, not by change, and they tried to show the eternity of the world by arguing that will would delay doing what it intended only for reasons of innovation or at least change, so that we have to think of it as a temporal process, wanting to do something at this time rather than earlier But this is the same mistake as that of the people mentioned earlier. The first agent is being thought of on the model of an agent exercising action in time, even though it acts by will, and so as an agent presupposing time rather than causing it. God, however, is the cause of even time itself, for time itself is part of the total universe God made; so when we talk of a universe issuing from God we can't think of him making it at one time rather than another earlier one. Such thinking presupposes time to making instead of subjecting time to making. Rather if we think of God producing the total universe of creatures including time, our question must not be why he made the universe at a certain time, but why he imposed a certain measure on time. And that depended simply on God's will: he wanted the world not to exist for ever but to start sometime, just as he wanted the heavens to be no bigger and no smaller than they are.

Hence: to 1: Goodness characteristically gives things existence by being willed; so creatures didn't have to be given existence whenever God was good, but whenever God willed it... to 6: What things do reflects what they are, so that the effects that issue from any efficiently operating cause must reflect that cause. In nature agents' "effects reflect them by reproducing the agent's form, and in the same way willed effects reflect their agents by reproducing the form the agent has willingly planned them to have, as we see in a Did Creation Occur in Time? craftsman's handiwork. But will plans not only the form of its effects but every other condition too: so that effects follow willing not at the moment of willing but when will plans them to. For effects reflect not the existence of will but its plans. So the willing could last for ever, but the effect won't follow it for ever... to 10: Before the world existed it was possible for it to come into existence not because something had a passive potentiality to become it but because an agent had an active power to make it. Alternatively, one can say it was possible not because of a potentiality but because the terms of the proposition A world exists are not mutually incompatible. In this way something can be called possible without any need for a potentiality, as Aristotle* says... to 12: This argument applies to agents that start to act by way of a new action, but God's action is eternal, since it is his very substance. So he is said to start to act because a new effect of his eternal action starts to exist, as planned by his will, which is then thought of as though it caused the action in relation to that effect. For effects follow from action in ways appropriate to the form determining the action: just as things heated by fire become hot in the way fire is hot... to 15: Since, as Aristotle® says, time's successiveness initially derives from the successiveness of change, whether every moment begins and ends a time depends on whether every moment begins and ends a change; so that if we suppose change did not and will not always exist we won't have to say that every moment begins and ends a time, but there will exist a moment which only begins time and one which only ends it. So this argument is circular and proves nothing, though it serves Aristotle's purpose, who was arguing ad hominem, as we said earlier. For many arguments depend upon assumptions made by opponents and so tell against their position, though they are not simply speaking valid. to 16: Every moment passes but not all pass from one state to another: the last moment of time passes only froma state, and the first moment only into one...

God as the Beginning of Things to 20: God does precede the world in duration, but in eternity, not in time, since God's existence is not measured by time. There was no real time before the world existed, but only imaginary time, in the sense that we, existing now, can imagine that before time began, while eternity existed, unlimited periods of time could have rolled by... to 25: Time isn't a static thing the whole substance of which exists simultaneously. So the whole of time doesn't have to exist when it begins, and there is nothing to stop us saying time began at an instant.

As to the arguments against:

Although they all argue to the truth only the first [1] does so with necessity, by quoting scripture.

[2] The argument from growth of cleverness during the course of time doesn't show time began.

It could be, as Aristotle himself says, that scientific studies often get interrupted for long periods and then taken up again as if for the first time.

[3] The earth too is never worn away in one place without being built up again in another by mutual interchange of elements.

[4] And God's duration, though identical with his nature in reality, is still different notionally, so that priority of nature doesn't imply priority of duration.

Passage 29 Providence (a): The Ordered Universe Source: Summa contra Gentiles, 3.97—8. Text from Summa contra Gentiles (Opera Omnia, Leonine edn., vol. xiv).

Date: 1264, Italy, aged 39.

[Chapter 97] What we have been saying clearly shows that the dispensations of God's providence have their reasons.

For we have shown that God's providence orders everything to a goal—his own goodness; not as if what happens could Providence: The Ordered Universe expand that goodness in any way, but things are made to reflect and express it as much as possible. Now created things must all fall short of the full goodness of God, so, in order that things may reflect that goodness more perfectly, there had to be variety in things, so that what one thing couldn't express perfectly could be more perfectly expressed in various ways bya variety of things. For human beings too, when they can't express the idea in their minds in one word, resort to many different ones that express the idea in different ways. And this also draws attention to how great

God's perfection is: for the perfect goodness that exists one and unbroken in God can exist in creatures only in a multitude of fragmented ways. Now variety in things comes from the different forms determining their species.

So because of their goal things differ in form.

And because they differ in form there is an order among things. By dint of having form a thing exists, and by existing it resembles God, who is his own existence pure and simple; so form can be nothing else than God's resemblance in things, which Aristotle' well described as something of divine good. Now the only possible way in which things can vary in resembling something absolutely simple is by closeness or remoteness, things more closely resembling God being the more perfect. So forms can differ only by degree of perfection. That is why Aristotle? compared definitions, which express things' natures or forms, to numbers, which change species by adding or subtracting 1. He was implying that variety in forms requires different levels of perfection.

And one has only to look at things' natures to see this. When you look carefully, you find the variety of things is achieved in steps: above inanimate bodies plants, above them unreasoning animals, and above them intelligent creatures; and within each step a variety of perfection such that the top members of a lower genus approach those of a higher genus and vice versa, animals without movement, for example, resembling plants; so that pseudo-Dionysius*® said: God's wisdom joins the ends of one domain to the beginnings of the next. Clearly then variety in things requires an order of levels in things, and not mere equality.

God as the Beginning of Things The same diversity of form which makes things differ in species makes their behaviour different too. For since activity follows on actuality and inactivity on potentiality, and since actuality is given by form, a thing's activity must accord with its form. So things differing in form act in different ways.

And since special activities pursue special goals, the special goals of things are also various, even though all have an ultimate goal in common.

Variety of forms also brings with it diverse relationships to matter. Since forms differ by degree of perfection, some are perfect enough to exist perfectly in their own right, without support from matter.

Others cannot exist perfectly of themselves but need matter as a sort of base, so that what exists in its own right is neither form alone nor matter alone

(since matter of itself has no actuality), but something combining the two. Now matter and form couldn't come together to make one thing unless there was some proportion between them, different matters or materials matching different forms. And that is why some forms need homogeneous material and others heterogeneous; and different forms require different organization of the matter fitted to their species of form and its activity. And these diverse relationships to matter bring with them a diversity of agencies and capabilities of being acted on. Form makes things active, matter makes them capable of being acted on and changed; so that less material things with more perfect forms act on things that are more material having less perfect forms.

And diversity of form and matter and agency brings with it diversity of characteristic and incidental properties. Because a thing's substance is a source of its properties (as the perfect of the imperfect) diversity of characteristic properties depends on diversity of substance; and because diverse agents affect what they act on diversely, diversity of incidental properties depends on diversity of agents.

Now from all this it is clear that God's providence, when it distributes a variety of properties artd activities and changes and spatial arrangements to the things it has created, has its reasons. That is why sacred scripture ascribes the production and management of things to God's wisdom and discretion,

Providence: The Ordered Universe saying In wisdom the Lord laid the earth's foundations, in understanding he set up the heavens, through his wisdom the deeps break out in spring and the clouds distil their dew

(Proverbs 3 [19-20]); and elsewhere that God's wisdom reaches from pole to pole with strength, arranging everything with sweetness (Wisdom 8 [1]), and later in the same book

(Wisdom 11 [20]): You have ordered all things by measure, number, and weight, meaning by measure the amount or mode or degree of perfection in each thing, by number the diversity and plurality of species that results from these degrees of perfection, and by weight the diverse attractions

_ to specific goals and activities, agents and patients, and properties resulting from the diversity of species.

Now in the hierarchy of reasons behind God's providence just described we have placed first God's own goodness: the ultimate goal as it were which first starts activity off; and after that the manyness of things, which in turn required the different degrees of forms and matters, agents and patients, activities and properties. So just as the absolutely first reason behind God's providence 'is God's goodness, so the first reason within creation is manyness in things, to set up and maintain which everything else seems to be ordered. So that it seems reasonable when Boethius* remarks that everything laid down in the primeval nature of things seems to have been formed by reason of number.

But now we must note that practical and theoretical reason are partly like one another and partly unlike. They are alike in this: speculative reason starting from some premiss reaches by intermediate steps an intended conclusion, and practical reason, directing our activity, starts from a beginning and reaches by intermediate means some intended activity or product of activity. But the starting-point for theoretical reason is a form and 'what a thing is', whereas in practical matters it is a goal, which is sometimes a form and sometimes something else.

Also in theorizing the starting-points compel our assent, but in practical matters they sometimes compel consent and sometimes not: human beings are compelled to will happiness as a goal, but not the building of a house. Again in scientific proofs later steps

God as the Beginning of Things follow necessarily from earlier ones, but this only happens in practical matters when there is only one way of achieving a goal: someone who wants to build a house must try to get hold of wood, but that he tries to get hold of deal comes from a simple act of his own will, not from the reason: building a house. And in the same way God must love his own goodness, but from this it doesn't follow necessarily that creatures must exist to express it, since God's goodness is perfect without that. So the coming to be of creatures, though it finds its first reason in God's goodness, nevertheless depends on a simple act of God's will. Given, however, that God does will to share 'iis goodness with creatures as far as that is possible by way of resemblance, then that gives the reason for the variety of creatures. But it doesn't necessitate this or that measure of perfection or this or that number of things. Given, however, that God by an act of will decides on this number of things and that measure of perfection for each thing, then that gives the reason for it having such a form and such matter. And so on in the same way down the list.

Clearly then the dispositions of providence have their reasons, but reasons that presuppose God's will. All this allows us to avoid two kinds of mistake. Firstly, the mistake of those who believe everything comes from simple will devoid of reason: the mistake of the sages in Moorish Law of whom Maimonides* speaks, who said there was no reason why fire should heat rather than make cold except that God willed it that way; and secondly, the mistake of those who say the causal order is a necessary consequence of God's providence. From what we have said both are clearly false.

Certain words of scripture, however, seem to suggest that everything is due to God's will. But not in order to remove all reason from the dispensation of providence but to show that God's will is the first source of everything, as we have said. Thus the psalm [135: 6] says the Lord does whatever he pleases; Job 11 [10] asks who can ask him Why have you done this? and Romans 9 [19] who can oppose his will?; and Augustine® writes: The first cause of health and of sickness, of reward and of penalty, of favour and requital is God's will alone. So when we ask the why of any natural effect we can

Providence: The Ordered Universe give a reason as an immediate cause as long as we recognize that its ultimate cause is God's will. So you can ask: Why does wood become hot in the presence of fire?, and answer:

Because heating is an activity native to fire. And this because heat is its characteristic property. And this because of the form that defines fire. And so on till we come to God's will.

To answer, because it is God's will, to the initial question about why wood gets hot is appropriate if you want to drive the question all the way back to the ultimate cause, but inappropriate if you are trying to exclude all the other causes.

[Chapter 98] [Is God bound by the order of his providence?] The foregoing suggests two sorts of order that can be discerned in the world: one universal, dependent on the first cause of everything and embracing everything, and the other particular, dependent on some created cause and extending to whatever is subordinate to that cause. Such particular orders are many, corresponding to the various causes found in creation, and they exist subordinated one to another in the way their causes are. Necessarily then all these particular orders are subordinate to the one universal order, descendants of that order of things which results in them because of their dependence on the first of causes. Political life offers a parallel: for all the members of a household are ordered to one another by subordination to the master of the house, and then that master and all other masters of households in a city ordered to one another and to the ruler of the city; and he with all his fellows in a kingdom ordered to the king.

However, the universal order in which everything is ordered by God's providence can be looked at from two points of view: that of the things ordered by it, and that of the kind of order it is, which depends on its source. Now we already showed in book 2 that the things subjected to his order God did not have to produce by necessity of his nature or some such thing, but that such things come from a simple act of his will, especially when first set up. It follows then that God can always do other things than those that he has done in the order of his providence: his power is not limited

God as the Beginning of Things to these things. But if we think of the way the kind of order it is depends on its source, then God can't do anything outside of that order. For it is an order deriving as we have seen from God's knowledge and will ordering everything to the goal of his own goodness. Now God can't do anything he doesn't will, since creatures derive from him not by nature but by act of will, as we have shown. Equally he can't do something he does not understand; since one can't will the unknown. Nor again can he create something not ordered to the goal of his goodness, since that goodness is the object defining his will. And likewise, because God is altogether unchanging, he can't will something that previously he didn't, or start to know something new or order it to his goodness. So God can't do anything that escapes the order of his providence, just as he can't do anything he isn't active in! He can do other things than those in fact subject to his providence and activity, considering his power in the abstract; but he can't do anything that hasn't been eternally subject to the order of his providence since he cannot change.

Because they haven't made this distinction people have made various mistakes.

Some have tried to extend the unchanging nature of God's order to the things themselves that are subject by it, saying everything must be as it is; so much so that some have said God couldn't do other than he did. This is contradicted by Matthew 26 [53]: Do you think

I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will send me more than twelve legions of angels? Some, however, have done the opposite, ascribing the changeable character of the things subject to divine providence to God's providence itself, thinking in a fleshly way that God like fleshly human beings had a changeable will. This is contradicted by Numbers 23

[19]: God is no human being that he should lie, no child of Adam that he should change his mind. Yet others thought God's providence didn't cover events that might or might not happen. And this is contradicted by Lamentations 3 [37]:

Who is there who has said something might happen without the Lord's command?

Providence: Chance and Freedom Passage 30 Providence (b): Chance and Freedom Source: Thomas's commentary on Aristotle's De Interpretatione,

1.9 (18526-1922). Text from In Aristotelis Librum Peri Hermeneias, 1.14 (Opera Omnia, Leonine edn., vol. i, reissued as ia).

Date: 1269-72, second stay in Paris, aged 45.

Type ofpassage and how to read: Commentary with digression (see Introduction). But this passage contains no commentary, but only one of Thomas's digressions.

Note, however, as Boethius does at this point in his commentary,' that there are various opinions about possibility and necessity, about can be and must be. Some people, like

Diodorus, distinguish these by reference to what happens, saying that can't be never happens, must be always happens, and can be sometimes happens and sometimes doesn't. The Stoics, however, distinguished them by reference to external obstruction, saying that the truth of must be can't be obstructed, of can't be is always obstructed, and of can be can sometimes be obstructed and sometimes not. Neither way of distinguishing them seems adequate. The first way gets things back to front: it is not that things must be because they always happen, but that they always happen because they must be, and similarly for the other definitions. And the second way appeals to something extrinsic and so to speak inessential: it is not that things must be because nothing obstructs them, but that nothing can obstruct them because they must be.

So other people have formulated a better distinction by reference to the natures of things, saying that must be is constrained by nature to exist, can't be is constrained by nature not to exist, and can be is not entirely constrained to either, but is sometimes inclined more to one than the other and sometimes equally balanced between the two—the socalled 'might be either'. And this is an opinion Boethius attributes to Philo, though clearly it is the one Aristotle

God as the Beginning of Things adopts here. For he explains can be and might be in human behaviour as due to our ability to deliberate, and in other things as due to their material's openness to being realized in different ways. However, the explanation seems inadequate.

For just as the matter of bodies that can decompose is open to existing or not existing, so in heavenly bodies there is an openness to being here or being there; and yet in the heavens everything happens as it must and never as it might be either.

So we have to say that, in general, matter's openness to either doesn't adequately explain might be, unless the powers that act on the matter are also open to either. Because if they are irresistibly determined on one course, then the passive might be of matter will always be realized in just that one way as a must.

Certain people, realizing this, held that the might bes of nature itself are restricted to a must be by a cause determined on one course called fate. The Stoics, for example, held fate to be a kind of sequence or chain of causes, because of two assumptions they made: that everything that happens in the world has a cause, and that given its cause an effect must follow. (And wherever there was no single sufficient cause, many co-operating causes took on the role of a single sufficient cause.) So they came to the conclusion that everything happens as it must. This argument Aristotle" invalidated by demolishing both its assumptions. For he says not everything has a cause, but only what exists in its own right. What exists only incidentally has no cause, since it doesn't properly have existence and, as Plato® also said, should rather be counted as not existing. That | am a musician has its cause, and that | am white likewise, but that what is white is a musician has no cause [as such], and all similar cases are the same. Neither is it true that given a cause—even a sufficient cause—its effect must follow; for not all causes—even sufficient ones—are such that their effects can't be obstructed: fire is a sufficient cause of wood burning, but you can stop it burning by drenching it with water. Now if both assumptions had been true the inevitable conclusion would have been that everything that happens must happen. For if every effect has a cause, then an effect about to happen after Providence: Chance and Freedom some specified time, in five days, say, would indicate some cause existing earlier, and that another, until we reached a cause in the present, or one already past. And if, given its cause, an effect must follow, the must be would then pass down the chain of causes to the end effect. If, for example, someone who has eaten salt will thirst, and someone thirsty will go out to get a drink, and someone going out will get killed by robbers, then, because he has already eaten the salt, he is bound to get killed. So Aristotle, to avoid this, showed both the assumed propositions to be false, as we have said.

Some people have remained unconvinced by this, arguing that everything incidental presupposes something existing in its own right, so that incidental effects do presuppose causes that cause in their own right. But what they haven't realized is that what the incidental presupposes as existing in its own right is just that thing to which it is incidental: my being a musician presupposes my being me, and every incidental property some underlying subject that exists in its own right.

So everything incidental in some effect presupposes that effect to exist in its own right, and as such have a cause that causes in its own right; but what is incidental in the effect doesn't have a cause that causes in its own right, but only an incidental cause. For effects must have causes proportionate to them, as Aristotle* says elsewhere.

Nevertheless, certain people, not distinguishing in effects between what is incidental and what exists in its own right, try to trace back every effect that happens here below to a cause existing in its own right, which they call fate and identify with the influence of the heavenly bodies, saying fate is a force exerted by the positions of the stars. But that kind of cause can't impose a must on everything going on here.

For much of what happens here is determined by mind and will, which aren't directly subject in themselves to the influence of heavenly bodies. Mind, which is reason, and will, which is reasonable, are not activities of bodily organs, as Aristotle* showed, so that they can't be directly subject to influence from the heavenly bodies: for bodily forces can act in their own right only on bodies. Our sense-powers, because they are activities of bodily organs, can be incidentally

God as the Beginning of Things subject to the activity of heavenly bodies; which leads Aristotle® to say that the people who believe the human will is subject to the movements of the heavens haven't distinguished mind from the senses. Mind and will, however, are indirectly influenced by the heavenly bodies inasmuch as they make use of the senses; but clearly our sensitive passions don't impose a must on our mind and will, for, as Aristotle says,' the disciplined man doesn't follow his bad desires. So the influence of the heavenly bodies doesn't impose a must on what we do with mind and will. But neither does it on other bodily happenings in this changeable world, for many things happen by acci-lent. Now the accidental can't be traced back to any natural cause or force as such, since forces in nature are fixed on one course, whereas the accidental has no unity. That is why we said above that I am a white musician is not a single proposition, because it doesn't express a single truth. And this is why Aristotle® says that many things the heavens predict—clouds and storms, say— never happen because they are incidentally obstructed. And although this obstruction, considered in its own right, can be traced back to some heavenly cause, nevertheless that it converges with what it obstructs is accidental and so cannot be traced back to any cause that acts by nature.

However, we must now note that the merely incidental can be apprehended as a unity by mind: being white and being a musician, which in themselves are two things not one, can be taken as one by a mind framing a single proposition connecting them. And this is the way it can sometimes happen that an event which in itself happens incidentally and by chance can be traced back to a mind that has set it up beforehand: as the meeting of two slaves in a certain place— which as far as they are concerned is incidental and chance because they didn't know about each other—can nevertheless have been intended by their master, who sent them both to the meeting in that place. And in this way some people have said that everything which goes on in this world, including even what seems fortuitous and chance, must be traced back to God's providence, on which they said fate hangs. Other people have stupidly denied this because they

Providence: Chance and Freedom have thought of God's mind on the model of ours that doesn't know singularities. But this is not so: for God's understanding and willing is his very existing. So that just as God's existence embraces in its power everything else that exists in any way whatever, thus sharing in a sense in God's existence, so too God's understanding and what he understands embraces all knowledge and all things that can be known, and God's will and what he wills embraces all desiring and all good things that can be desired. So that by the very fact that something is knowable he knows it, and by the very fact that something is good he wills it, just as by the very fact that something exists it is subject to his active influence, which he utterly comprehends since he acts by his mind.

But if God's providence is the cause of everything that happens in the world, or at the very least all good things, it seems that everything must happen the way it does: firstly, because he knows it and his knowledge can't be mistaken, so what he knows must necessarily happen; and secondly, because he wills it and his will can't be ineffective, so everything he' wills, it seems, must necessarily happen. But these objections depend on thinking of knowledge in God's mind and the working of God's will on the model of such activities in us, when they are in fact very different.

For firstly, in regard to knowledge we should note that a mind contained in some way within time relates differently to the knowing of what happens in time from a mind altogether outside time. A convenient illustration may be drawn from space, since, according to Aristotle,? the successiveness of time derives from that of change and movement, and that from extended successiveness in space. So if we imagine many people travelling a road, all those travelling will have knowledge of the people in front and behind them, according to their beforeness and afterness in space. And so each traveller will see the people next to him and the people in front, but not the people behind. But if someone is outside the whole travelling situation, standing in some high tower, for example, from which he can see the whole road, then he will have a bird's-eye view of every

God as the Beginning of Things traveller, not seeing them as in front or behind in relation to his own seeing, but seeing them all together in front and behind each other. Now since our knowing occurs within time, either in itself or incidentally (so that when making propositional connections and disconnections we have to add tense, as Aristotle'® points out), things are known as present or past or future. Present events are known as actually existing and perceptible to the senses in some way; past events are remembered; and future events are not known in themselves—because they don't yet exist—but can be predicted from their causes: with certainty if their causes totally determine them, as with things that must happen; conjecturally if they are not so determined that they cannot be obstructed, as with things that happen usually; and not at all if they are only possible and not determined either to one side or the other, as with things that might be either, for we know things not by their potentialities but by what is realized in them, as Aristotle!' says. God's knowing, however, is altogether outside time, as if he stands on the summit of eternity where everything exists together, looking down in a single simple glance on the whole course of time. So in his one glance he sees everything going on throughout time, and each as it is in itself, not as something future to himself and his seeing and visible only as it exists within its causal situation (although he sees that causal situation). But he sees things altogether eternally, each as it exists in its own time, just as our own human eye sees John sitting there himself, not just as something determined by causes. Nor does our seeing John sitting there stop it being an event that might not have been when regarded just in relation to its causes. And yet while he is sitting there we see him sitting there with certainty and without doubt, since when a thing exists in itself it is already determined. In this way then God knows everything that happens in time with certainty and without doubt, and yet the things that happen in time are not things that must exist or must come to exist, but things that might or might not be.

A similar difference must be noted in regard to God's will; for God's will is to be thought of as existing outside the Providence: Chance and Freedom realm of existents, as a cause from which pours forth everything that exists in all its variant forms. Now what can be and what must be are variants of being, so that it is from God's will itself that things derive whether they must be or may or may not be and the distinction of the two according to the nature of their immediate causes. For he prepares causes that must cause for those effects that he wills must be, and causes that might cause but might fail to cause for those effects that he wills might or might not be. And it is because of the nature of their causes that some effects are said to be effects that must be and others effects that need not be, although all depend on God's will as primary cause, a cause which transcends this distinction between must and might not. But the same cannot be said of human will or of any other cause, since every other cause exists within the realm of must and might not. So of every other cause it must be said either that it can fail to cause, or that its effect must be and cannot not be; God's will, however, cannot fail, and yet not all his effects must be, but some can be or not be.

In the same way some people strive to uproot the other root of may or may not be—that which Aristotle here identifies with our ability to deliberate—wanting to show that will when it chooses is compelled to move by what it desires. For since the object of willing is what is good, it doesn't seem possible to turn away will from desiring what seems to it good, just as reason can't be turned away from assenting to what seems to it true. And so it seems that any choice consequent on deliberation will always be made under compulsion; so that everything which takes its rise from our deliberation and choice will be done under compulsion. But the answer to this is that goods differ just as truths do.

Certain truths like the first unprovable premisses of all proofs are self-evident and compel the assent of mind; but certain truths are not self-evident but evident for other reasons. And there are two sorts of such truth. Some follow necessarily from the premisses, and given the truth of the premisses can't be false, and these are all provable conclusions; the mind must assent to such truths once it has perceived their relation to the premisses, though not before.

God as the Beginning of Things Other truths don't follow necessarily from the premisses and even given the truth of the premisses they can be false; they are matters of opinion and the mind doesn't have to assent to them, although it may, for some motive or other, incline to one side or the other. Now in the same way there is also a certain good which is desirable for its own sake, namely, happiness, which has the nature of ultimate goal, and the will is compelled to adhere to that good, for there is a sort of natural compulsion on everyone to want to be happy. But there are other goods which are desirable for the sake of the goal, and can be compared to the goal as conclusions are to premisses, in the way Aristotle'? explains. If then there were goods which were sine qua nons of happiness, these too would compel desire, and most of all in a person that perceived the connection: and existence, life, understanding, and the like are perhaps goods like these. But the particular goods to which human activity is directed are not like this, and are not seen as sine qua nons of happiness: eating or not eating this food or that, for instance; but something in them attracts desire according to the good we see in them. And so our wills are not compelled to choose them. And it is worthy of notice for this reason that Aristotle identified the root of might or might not be in what we do with deliberation, which is concerned with as yet undetermined means to a goal. For, as Aristotle'? says, when the means are already determined there is no role for deliberation.

We have been saying all these things in order to defend Aristotle's identification here of the roots of might and might not be; though we have trespassed beyond the borders of a logician's business.'* Passage 31 Providence (c): How Evil is Caused Source: Summa contra Gentiles, 3.10. Text from Summa contra

Gentiles (Opera Omnia, Leonine edn., vol. xiv).

Date: 1264, Italy, aged 39.

Providence: How Evil is Caused Parallel reading: Passage 35 on moral action.

Notes on translation: 'Vice' is used to translate vitium and give the required opposition to 'virtue', virtus. But vitium has a broader connotation: that of something being vitiated; and virtus has the ordinary Latin meaning of 'strength' still present in it. Moral words and words about nature were not so absolutely separated as they misleadingly are today.

[Chapter 10] We can conclude from what we have said that only good can cause evil.

For even if evil causes evil, since we have proved that evil acts only by the power of some good, that good will have to be the primary cause of the evil.

Further, what doesn't exist can't cause anything.

So all causes must be some or other existent thing. But we have proved that an evil is not an existent thing. So evil can't cause anything. If then there is a cause of evil it must be a good.

Again, whatever is in and of itself a cause tends towards an effect proper to it. If then evil of itself caused, it would tend towards some evil effect proper to it. But this is false for we have shown that all agents tend towards good. So evil can't cause anything of itself but only incidentally. Incidental causes, however, must be traced back to what is of itself a cause. Now only good is of itself a cause; evil can't be. So evil must be caused by good.

Moreover, a cause is either an effect's material, the form (that the material takes on], an agent [imposing form on the material], or a goal [drawing the agent to impose the form].

But evil can't be matter or form, for we showed above that potential being was good and actual being was good. Again, it can't be an agent, for an agent's activity issues from its actuality and the form it has; nor again can it be a goal, since as we have proved evil is never intended. So evil can't be a cause of anything. If evil, then, has a cause, it must be caused by good.

However, since good and evil are opposites, and one opposite can't cause another except incidentally, as Aristotle'

God as the Beginning of Things says cold causes heat, it follows that good can actively cause evil only incidentally.

In nature this incidentalness can be on the agent's side or on the effect's side. On the agent's side when the agent is deficient in power and so acts defectively and produces a deficient effect: for example, a weak stomach can lead to imperfect digestion and bile, which are natural evils. But deficiency is incidental to the agent as agent; for it is not active inasmuch as it lacks power but inasmuch as it has some: if it had no power at all it wouldn't act. So on the agent's side evil is caused incidentally because of the agent's deficiency in power. And this is why evil is sometimes said to have a defective rather than an effective cause, since evil follows from an agent only in so far as it is lacking in power and to that extent non-effective. It comes down to the same if the defect in action and effect comes from a defect in a tool or anything else that the agent's action requires, as when our motive powers produce limping because our leg is crooked: for the agent acts by way of both, by his power and his tool.

On the effect's side, good incidentally causes evil relative to the effect's matter or relative to its form. For if the matter is not disposed to receive the agent's imprint a defect will follow in the effect, as when monsters are born because of unprepared matter: the fact that it doesn't transform and actualize the indisposed matter can't be laid at the door of the agent, for agents have powers proportioned to their natures and their inability to go further can't be called deficiency in power; we can say that only when its power falls short of the measure laid down by nature. Relative to the form of the effect, evil can occur incidentally because the form that is there is necessarily accompanied by lack of another form, so that the generation of one thing entails the decomposition of another. But this evil is not evil to the effect intended by the agent, as is clear from the foregoing, but to some other thing. In nature then evil is clearly caused incidentally by good; and the sameé is true in things artificially made, for craft imitates nature' in its activities, and faults occur in the same way in both.

But in moral matters things seem to happen differently.

Providence: How Evil is Caused For moral vice doesn't seem to follow from deficiency of power, since weakness of power either totally removes moral vice or at least diminishes it. Weakness doesn't deserve the penalties culpable acts deserve but rather mercy and pardon: moral vice must be voluntary not necessary. However, if we examine matters closely we will see similarities and dissimilarities. The dissimilarity is this: moral vice is ascribed only to actions, not to effects, for moral virtues are virtues of doing, not making, whereas crafts are virtues of making in which, as we have just said, faults happen just as they do in nature. So moral evil is not ascribed to the matter or form of an effect, but follows only on the agent.

Now in moral actions we come across in order four causes of action. There is first the executive or motive power that moves our limbs to execute the command of will. So this power is moved by a second cause, will. Will in turn is moved by a judgement of our perceptive power, which judges things to be good or bad, good and bad being objects of will, one moving the will to follow and the other to flee.

And our perceptive power in turn is moved by what it perceives. So the first source of movement in moral actions is what is perceived, the second the perceiving power, the third the will, and the fourth the motive power executing reason's command. Now the executive power's action already presupposes moral goodness or badness, for external action is only thought moral if it is voluntary: so when will is good the external action is good, and when evil evil. If the external act was deficient with some non-voluntary defect there would be no moral evil there at all; limping, for example, isn't a moral fault but a natural one, and such a defect in the executive power totally or partially excuses us from moral fault. Again, the action of what is perceived on the perceptive power is free of moral fault, for what we see influences our sight in the natural order, and similarly with any object's action on a passive power. And even the act of the perceptive power as such, considered in itself, lacks moral fault, since defects there excuse or diminish moral fault just as in the executive power: weakness and ignorance equally excuse or diminish sin.

God as the Beginning of Things What remains then is that moral fault is first and foremost found only in acts of will, and that seems reasonable since actions are called moral only when they are voluntary. So the root and origin of moral faults must be sought in acts of will.

Nowa difficulty seems to attend such an enquiry. If action is deficient because of a defect in its active source a defect in the will must pre-exist the moral fault. If that is a natural defect it will always be there and the will will sin morally whenever it acts; but acts of virtue show that to be false. But if the defect is voluntary then its existence is already a moral fault, the cause of which must be sought in its turn. And that enquiry will go on for ever. So we are forced to say that the defect pre-existing in the will is not natural—lest the will sin in every act—nor fortuitous or chance—for that would not be a moral fault of ours since chance things are unpremeditated and outside reason. So the defect is a voluntary one and yet not itself a moral fault lest we be forced into an infinite regress. So how this can be must now be considered.

Now perfection in power of any active principle at all depends on some higher agent: for secondary agents act through the power of primary agents. Now as long as a secondary agent remains ordered to the primary agent it can act without deficiency; but it will act defectively if it is turned aside from its orderedness to the primary agent, as we see when tools fail to respond to their user's movements. Now we have said that in the orderedness of a moral action two causes precede will, namely, our perceptive power and what it perceives as a goal. But since the ability of one thing to be moved corresponds to the ability of another thing to move it, not any perceptive power moves any appetite, but this this and that that: the due mover of our sensual appetite is our power of sense-perception, and the due mover of will is reason. Again, since reason can perceive many goods and goals, whereas everything has its own due goal, there will be a goal and first mover of the will which will not be any good but a certain determinate one. When then will tends to action moved by a reasoned perception representing to it its due good, right action will result. But when will breaks out in action under the stimulation of sense-perception, or of Providence: Does God Cause Evil? reason itself but presenting the will with some other good than its due good, morally faulty action will ensue. What precedes the faulty action in the will is thus a defect of orderedness to reason and a.due goal: to reason, when some sudden sense-perception draws will towards a good pleasurable to the senses; to a due goal, when reason decides by reasoning on a good which isn't good at this moment or in that way, and yet will is drawn to it as to its due good. Now this defect of orderedness is voluntary, for will has in itself the power to will or not to will, and also the power to make reason actually consider or stop considering, or to consider this rather than that. But the defect is not a moral fault, for reason can consider this good or that good or nothing at all without any fault until the moment comes when the will tends towards the undue goal; and then we already have an act of will.

Both in nature and in moral matters then evil is clearly caused by good only incidentally.

Passage 32 Providence (d): Does God Cause Evil?

Source: Thomas's public disputations on Evil, 3.1-2. Text from Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo (Opera Omnia, Leonine edn., vol. xxiii).

Date: 1270-2, second stay in Paris, aged 46.

Type of passage and how to read: Disputed question (see Introduction).

Notes on translation: 'Sin' translates peccatum, which often has the broader notion of 'fault' or 'failure', moral or non-moral, as Thomas points out in this passage. See previous passage, notes on translation.

[Question 3] The subject for debate is What causes sins.

[Article 1] And in the first place we are asked: Does God cause sins?

And it seems he does:

God as the Beginning of Things For [1] St Paul says in Romans 1 [28]: God has given them up to their own foul desires and filthy practices, and the gloss—taken from Augustine\—comments: Clearly God is at work in human hearts bending their wills to whatever he wants, good or evil. But the bending of will towards evil is sin. So God causes sins...

Moreover, [3] guilty acts run counter to the goodness of God's grace, and punishments to the goodness of nature. But God punishes despite being nature's source, so he can cause guilty acts despite being the source of grace.

Moreover, [4] what causes a cause causes its effect. So since God causes our free choice and that causes sin, God causes sins.

Moreover, [5] whatever powers tend towards God causes.

But some God-given powers tend towards sin: our aggressive capacity to murder, our affective capacity to adultery. So God causes sins...

Moreover, [7] pseudo-Dionysius" says the causes of evil lie in God. But they can't be there in vain. So God must cause evils: sins among them.

Moreover, [8] Augustine? says grace in the soul is like a light by which we work good and without which we can't work any good. In this way grace causes good works, and so, conversely, taking away grace causes sins. But it is God who takes away grace. So God causes sins.

Moreover, [9] Augustine* says: That there are evils which I have not done, I ascribed to your grace. But that someone doesn't do evil wouldn't be ascribed to grace if he could avoid sin without grace. So it is not sin that deprives us of grace, but rather being deprived of grace that causes us to sin. And so we conclude, as before, that God causes sins.

Moreover, [10] whatever we praise in creatures must be attributed most of all to God. But Ecclesiasticus 31 [10] praises just men for being able to sin and not sinning. Much more then must this be true of God. So God can sin, and in consequence cause sins...

Providence: Does God Cause Evil?

Moreover, [17] whoever commands sin causes sins. But we find God commanding sin in 3 Kings 22 [22], for example, when, after the lying spirit had said I will go out and be a lying spirit in the prophets'.mouths, God said: Go and do it; and in Hosea 1 where God orders Hosea to take a whore and have children by her. So God causes sins...

[1] Augustine® says God is never responsible for men getting worse. But sin makes men worse. So God is never responsible for sin.

Moreover, [2] Fulgentius® says that God is not responsible for what he avenges. But God avenges sin. So he is not responsible for it.

Moreover, [3] God only causes what he loves, since Wisdom 11 [2] says You love everything that exists and hate nothing you have made. But he hates sin, as Wisdom 14 [9] says:

God hates equally the impious and their impiety. So God is not responsible for sin.

People cause sins in two ways: by sinning themselves and by causing others to sin, and neither way can apply to God.

That God can't sin is clear whether we understand sin broadly to mean fault or narrowly to mean moral fault. [In Latin usage] sin is broadly used to mean any failure of activity, natural or designed, to reach its goal. Such failure results from a defect in a thing's ability to act: in the grammatical skill of someone who makes a mistake in writing

(given that he intended to write correctly), in the semen's ability to transmit the genes when malformation of offspring occurs in nature. But the meaning of sin proper to morals is of culpable failure of will to reach a due goal because it is drawn towards an unsuitable one. Now in God neither his power to act can fail—since his power is unlimited—nor his will fail to reach its due goal—since his will, identical with his nature, is itself the supreme good, ultimate goal, and first standard for every will. So his will by nature cleaves to God as the Beginning of Things supreme good, and can no more fail to reach it than the desire natural to any other thing can fail to desire its own natural good. So God can't cause sin by sinning himself.

But neither can he cause others to sin. For sin as we are now talking of it consists in a created will turning away from its ultimate goal. Now it is impossible for God to make a will turn away from its ultimate goal since he is that goal. For what all created agents share must derive froma reflection in them of the first agent, who makes everything as like himself as they are capable of being, as pseudo-Dionysius' says. But every created agent acts in such a way as to attract other things to itself in some fashion and shape them to its own likeness, either by natural likeness (as when heat heats) or by turning towards its own goal (as when a man commands others to pursue the goal he has in mind). So it must be fitting for God too to turn everything to himself, turning nothing away. But he is the supreme good. So it cannot be he who causes will to turn away from the supreme good, which is what makes a culpable fault of the kind we are now talking about.

God then cannot cause sin.

Hence: to 1: God is said to give people up to foul desires or to bend their wills to evil not by acting on them and moving them, but by deserting them and not interfering, in the way someone who doesn't put out his hand to help a falling man might be said to cause the fall. But God's judgement that he will not help some who fall is just. . . to 3: Punishment runs counter to some particular good, and to take away a particular good may not run counter to the highest good, since its place may be taken by another maybe better good. Thus though water may go, fire takes its place, and in the same way though punishment takes away what is good for some particular nature, a better good—God's just ordering of things—takes its place. The evil of a guilty act on the other hand runs counter to the highest good, and from that the highest good cannot turn away. God then can punish but not cause guilty acts.

Providence: Does God Cause Evil? to 4: What an effect does precisely as effect can be traced back to the cause, but whatever else effects do can't. Movement of a leg can be traced back to the animal's power to move it, but a limp in the walk isn't due to the animal's power but to the leg's own inability to respond to the animal's movement. And our free choice causes sin by a lack of response to God. God then causes the free choice but not the sin. to 5: Sins aren't caused by our aggressive or affective tendencies as God set them up in us, but by disorders in those tendencies. He set them up to obey reason, and any tendency to sin, against reason, is not from God... to 7: The causes of evil are particular goods which can fall short in some way. As good such particular goods lie in God in the way all effects lie in their causes. And in this sense the causes of evil lie in God, but not in the sense that he himself causes their evil. to 8: God on his side gives to everything as much of himself as it can take in; and if something falls short of its share in God's goodness, that must be because it presents some obstacle to the sharing.

If grace then is not present in someone, the cause is not God but some obstacle to grace presented by the recipient, who turns away froma light that never turns itself away, as pseudo-Dionysius® says. to 9: We must say different things about the state of human nature when created and its state after Adam's fall. When created nothing pulled human beings towards evil, though their natural goodness was not enough to win them heaven; so they needed the help of grace to deserve heaven but not to avoid sin: what they had been given in their nature was enough for them to be able to hold their ground. But after Adams fall they were pulled towards evil and needed grace's help to avoid falls, and it is in this state that Augustine ascribes to grace that there were evils he didn't do; but this state is caused bya previous sin. to 10: Lesser things can be praised for something that would

— be out of place in greater ones: pseudo-Dionysius' says we God as the Beginning of Things praise dogs for savagery but not humans. In the same way not sinning when they could is praise that suits humans, but falls short of the praise due to God... to 17: God saying Go and do it mustn't be understood as commanding but permitting, like Jesus saying to Judas in John 13 [27] What you are to do, do quickly, in the sense in which we talk of God's will permitting things. But God telling Hosea to take himself a whore is a command, and as a divine command it makes what would otherwise have been a sin not a sin. For as Bernard'° says, God can dispense the second tablet of commandments which deal with man's relations with his neighbour, since the good of the neighbour is a particular good, but he can't dispense the first tablet of commandments which deal with man's relationship to [Article 2] And in the second place we are asked: Does God cause sinful actions?

And it seems he doesn't:

[1] For we are said to sin only because of the sinful actions we cause: as pseudo-Dionysius'! says, nobody ever does evil intentionally. But God is not responsible for sins, as was said above. So God doesn't cause sinful actions.

Moreover, [2] a thing's cause is the cause of everything that belongs to it by definition: to cause Socrates is to cause a human being. Now there are certain actions that are sins by definition. If then God caused the sinful action he would be responsible for the sin...

Moreover, [4] sinful action is freely chosen action, called free because self-moved. But actions caused by someone else are moved by another, not self-moved and not free. So sinful actions are not caused by God.

{1] Augustine'? says God's will is the cause of every nature and every movement. But a sinful action is a certain freely chosen movement. So it comes from God.

Providence: Does God Cause Evil?

There were two opinions about this in the old days. The earliest opinion was that sinful actions were not caused by God, since God didn't cause the evilness as such of the sins.

But others said sinful actions were caused by God, since the actual being of any action must come from God, and that for two reasons. Firstly, for the general reason that since it is

God's very nature to exist he exists of his substance, and that means he must be the source of everything else's existence.

For nothing else is its own existence: everything else is said to exist by sharing, and what shares derives what it shares from something that has it of its substance: just as everything on fire is derived from what is fire in its substance. Clearly then, since a sinful action exists in some sense and belongs in one of the categories of being, it comes from God. Secondly, this is also true for a special reason. All movements of secondary causes must be caused by a primary cause, in the way all movements here below are caused by the movement of the heavens. Now in the way the heavens are the first cause of all bodily movement, so God is the first source of all movement whatever, bodily and spiritual. Since then sinful actions are certain freely chosen movements, we have to say that sinful actions, as actions, come from God.

Note, nevertheless, that the movements of the first mover are not received into everything moved by them in exactly the same way, but in ways appropriate to each. The heavens move inanimate objects, which don't move themselves, in one way, and animals, which do move themselves, in another. And under the influence of the heavens plants that are genetically perfect grow perfect seed, whilst those genetically imperfect produce seed that is sterile. When a recipient is rightly disposed to receive the first mover's movement it will produce activity perfectly in accordance with the first mover's intentions, but when it is not rightly disposed and ready to receive that movement it will produce imperfect activity, which as activity can be traced back to the first mover, but as flawed cannot be so traced back. For the flaw in the action results from the agent precisely as not rightly ordered to its first mover, as we have said: just $.P.W.

God as the Beginning of Things as movement of a limping animal comes from its motive powers, but the flawedness of movement comes not from the motive powers but from the leg's inability to profit from those motive powers. What we must say then is that God is the first source of all movements, and that some things are so moved by him that they also move themselves, having free choice. If such things are rightly disposed and ordered in the way needed to receive God's movements there will result good actions that can be totally traced back to God's causality; but if they are not properly ordered then there will result a disordered or sinful action, in which what there is of action can be traced back to God's causality but what there is of disorder and deformity does not have God as cause but our free choice.

For this reason then we say that God is responsible for sinful actions but not for sins.

Hence: to 1: Although sinners don't will the evilness of their sin as such it is still included in some fashion in what they will, since they rather choose to incur that evilness than stop acting. But sin's evilness isn't in any way included in God's will, but is a consequence of our free choice abandoning its relationship to God's will. to 2: The evilness of sin doesn't belong to actions as defined in nature (which is how God causes them) but as defined morally (which is how free choice causes them); and this we said in an earlier question... to 4: In self-movement what is moved also does the moving; in movement by another what does the moving is different.

Now clearly when something is moved by another, that other, just because it is doing the moving, is not necessarily the first source of the whole movement: it could be that it in turn is being moved by another, and does its moving precisely as moved by that other. In the same way then, when something is self-moved, it can still be being moved by another and doing its moving precisely as moved by that other. And in that way God being the cause of our freely chosen actions isn't incompatible with their freedom.

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will?

Passage 33 Is God at Work in Nature and in Will?

Source: Thomas's public disputations on the Power of God, 3.7—-8.

Text from Quaestiones Disputatae de Potentia (Marietti edn., Turin, 1953), with corrections from the Leonine text in preparation.

Date: 1265-7, Italy, aged 40.

Type of passage and how to read:

Disputed question (see Introduction).

Parallel reading: The reader should compare the first four proofs of God's existence in Passage 20 with the four ways in which God is active in nature in this passage: Proof 1 with Way 3, 2 with Way 4,

3 with Way 2, 4 with Way 1.

[Question 3] The subject for debate is Creation—the first effect of God's power.

... [Article 7] And in the seventh place we are asked: Is God at work within every activity of nature?

For [1] nature is provided with what it needs, neither more nor less. Now nature's activities need only agent powers to act and recipients to be acted on. So they don't need God's power working within things...

Moreover, [3] if God does act in every activity of nature, then God and nature exercise either one and the same activity or distinct activities. Now not one and the same, for single activities derive from single natures—Christ with two natures exercises two activities—and God is clearly not of one nature with creatures. But not distinct activities either, for distinct activities can't yield the same end-product, since what differentiates movements and activities is their destination. So there is no way God can act in nature...

Moreover, [7] if God acts in natural activity his action must contribute something to natural things, for in doing a doer

God as the Beginning of Things must do something. Now either the contribution is enough to enable the thing to act by itself, or not. If it's enough, then why, by the same token, isn't the natural power God has already given nature enough for action? Why once that was given did activity need anything further from God? But if it's not enough, then God will have to contribute something else, and if that's not enough something else, and so on endlessly.

And impossibly, for a single effect can't depend on an infinite number of actions, which could never get finished since you can't bridge the infinite. So rather than start on this path let us admit that natural powers are enough for natural activity, and don't need God acting further within them...

Moreover, [9] things of an utterly different sort can be separated one from another. Now God's activity and nature's are of an utterly different sort, the first willed and the second necessitated. So God's activity can be separated from nature's, and God needn't be active in the activities of nature...

Moreover, [12] Ecclesiasticus 11 [14] says God made man and left him in the hands of his own counsel. But if he is always active within our wills he hasn't left us. So he isn't active within willed activity.

Moreover, [13] the will is mistress of its own acts. Now that wouldn't be so if it could only act when God acted in it; for the will is not mistress of God's activity. So God isn't active in our willed activities...

Moreover, [16] given action by a sufficient cause, we don't need to postulate action from any other cause. But unquestionably, if God is active in will and nature, his activity is a sufficient one: The works of God are perfect according to Deuteronomy 32 [4]. So no activity of will or nature would then be necessary, and since nature contains nothing unnecessary in nature, neither nature nor will would do anything, but only God. But this can't be right, so neither can the premiss that God is active in will and nature.

[1] Isaiah 26 [12] says Lord, you work in us every work we do.

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will?

Moreover, [2] nature presupposes God, just as craft presupposes nature. But nature acts in a craftsman's handiwork, for without nature's activity the craftsman couldn't himself act: unless iron was softened by fire the smith couldn't hammer it out. So God too acts in natural activity.

Moreover, [3] Aristotle' says that human reproduces human with co-operation from the sun. Now just as the human activity of reproduction requires the sun's action, so too, and much more, does nature's activity require God's. So whatever nature does God does also.

Moreover, [4] nothing can act unless it exists. But nature can't exist without God's activity: it would fall away to nothing unless God's power maintained it in existence, as Augustine? makes clear. So nature can't act without God's activity.

Moreover, [5] God's power exists in every natural thing, for God exists in everything by substance, power, and presence.

But we can't say God's power exists in things for no reason.

So it must do something in nature. Nor can we say that what it does is different from what nature does, since we see only the one activity. So God acts in every natural activity.

We must unequivocally concede that God is at work in all activity, whether of nature or of will. But some misunderstand this, mistakenly attributing every natural activity to God in such a way that things in nature do nothing at all by their own power; a position espoused for various reasons.

Thus, according to Moses Maimonides,? some sages in Moorish Law said all natural forms were incidental properties, and thought that because such properties can't move across from one subject to another there was no way anything in nature could use its own form to introduce like forms into other subjects: so it is not fire that heats, they said, but God who creates heat in the thing heated. And to the objection that the heating always occurs when fire is being applied to the thing to be heated—except when external factors thwart the fire—which shows that of itself fire heats, they used to reply that God has ordained things to God as the Beginning of Things take that course, so that he never causes heat except in the presence of fire, though the fire present contributes nothing to the heat. Now this position clearly conflicts with our senses: our senses sense only when affected by what they sense (this is clearly true of touch and the other senses, even if sight seems doubtful to those who say it works by emitting something), so we would not feel fire's heat unless fire acted to reproducea likeness of its heat in our sense-organs. If that specific likeness of heat was something else's doing, touch would feel heat but not the fire's heat: it would not feel the fire to be hot though that is its judgement, and senses do not make mistakes in judgement about their own defining senseobject. The position also conflicts with reason, which tells us nothing in nature is without a function. But unless things in nature actually did something, the powers and forces they have in them by nature would be without function: if it is not the knife that cuts, of what use is its sharpness? And of what use is the fire's presence under the wood if God is burning the wood without it? The position also conflicts with God's goodness, which in sharing itself out causes things not only to resemble him in existing but also to resemble him in being active. In fact, the reason adduced for this position is altogether trivial. For when we say an incidental property can't move across from one subject to another we mean numerically the same property can't, not that a property in one natural thing can't cause a property of the same kind to be introduced into some other subject: something which must happen in every activity of nature. Moreover, the supposition that all forms are incidental properties is itself false: for then there would be no substances in nature (which are constituted by substantial, not just incidental, forms), and thus no birth, no death, and many suchlike inconveniences.

Another position is taken up by Ibn Gebirol:* namely, that it is not bodies that act, but a spiritual force spread through all bodies acts within them, and bodies are more active the purer and subtler they are, the more able to be penetrated by this spiritual force. He relies on three arguments: firstly, that all agents after God require some subject-matter to act on,

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? but that there is no subject-matter outside body on which it could act; secondly, that quantitative bulk hinders activity and movement (increase in bulk slows movement and makes bodies heavier), so that bady (which is by definition bulky) can't act; and thirdly, that body is furthest distant from the primary agent of all that acts but is never acted on, that in between must come agents that act and are acted on, and body—the last in line—must be acted on but never act.

But the fallacy here is obvious: body is being regarded as numerically one and the same substance, as though it was merely accidentally various and not made up of distinct substances. As soon as you accept a variety of substantially distinct bodies, then not every body is the last in line or the most distant from the primary agent, but some are above others and nearer the primary agent and so can act on others. Again, what he says pays attention only to the matter of body and not its forms, though it is composite of both. It is because of their matter that bodies come last in line and have no further subject-matter to act on, but in regard to their form every other body in which matter can potentially take on the form this body already actually has is further subject-matter for it, and so bodies can engage in mutual activity, the matter of one potential of the form of another, and vice versa. And if the form isn't enough for activity, neither, for the same reason, would this spiritual force be, since of necessity it would be taken in by bodies in a bodily mode. Again, quantitative bulk doesn't stop things acting or moving, for Aristotle' proves that without quantity nothing can move. Nor is it quantitative bulk that makes things heavy—Aristotle® disproved that. Quantity makes natural movements faster: the bigger a heavy body the faster it falls, and the bigger a light one the faster it rises. Though quantity is not itself a source of activity it acts as a tool of the qualities that make things active; there is nothing in quantity to hinder their activity, except in so far as the embedding of those qualities in matter of a certain quantity restricts their existence to that particular matter and prevents them being active in other matter. However, though they exist particularized in matter they still possess their specific character,

God as the Beginning of Things the like of which they can reproduce, even if they numerically cannot exist in another subject.

So one must not understand the statement that God is at work in everything in nature as if that meant the thing itself did nothing; rather it means that God is at work in the very activity of nature and free will. And how that can be we will now explain. Note that there are several ways in which one thing can be said to cause another's activity. Firstly, by providing it with its power to act. Thus Aristotle" says that the parent producer of something heavy or light produces movement in it by producing its power to move. And God does everything that nature does in this sense since he gives all things in nature the powers to act. And he does this not merely as the parent of something heavy or light gives it a power and then maintains it no further, but as a continual maintainer of those natural powers in existence. For he is the cause not only of the occurrence of those powers, as the parent is, but of their existence. So God can be said to cause activity not only by causing a thing's power but by maintaining it in existence, and this is a second way in which things are said to cause activity in others, by maintaining their active power: like medicine that maintains one's sight is said to cause one to see. But because nothing can act or initiate movement of itself unless it can act without being acted on, there is a third way in which one thing can be said to cause another's activity: by moving it to act. Here we are not thinking of either the production of power or its maintenance, but of its application to activity, in the way a human being causes a knife to cut by applying its sharpness, moving it to actual cutting. And because lower agents in nature act only when moved, causing alteration only by being altered, and because the heavens, which can cause alteration without being altered, can't move without being moved, and because this chain only ends when we reach

God, it must follow that God causes every activity of things in nature by initiating it, applying the thing's power to act to its activity.

But we find, further, that just as causes are ordered so are effects: necessarily, since effects resemble their causes and Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? secondary causes can't of their own power produce the effect of the primary cause, although they can act as tools of the primary cause in producing that effect. For tools do in some sense cause the effect the principal cause is producing, though not by their own form or power; they do it by being moved by the principal cause and sharing in the principal cause's power that way, as the adze doesn't cause the carpentry by its own form or power but by the carpenter's power moving it, which in a way it shares. So a fourth way in which one thing causes another's activity is the way a principal agent causes a tool's activity. And in this way too we must say that God causes the activity of things in nature.

For the higher a cause is [in an order of causes] the more extensively effective it is, and the more effective it is the deeper it acts within the effect bringing remoter potentialities to realization. Now everything in nature exists, and is a thing of nature, and a thing of this or that nature: the first being common to everything there is, the second to everything in nature, the third to everything of one species, and a fourth— adding in incidental properties—peculiar to a particular individual. This individual then when acting cannot produce another individual of the same species unless it acts as a tool of what causes that species as a whole, and beyond that of what causes the existence of all lower nature. For this reason nothing can cause species here below unless by the power of the heavenly bodies, and nothing can cause existence unless by the power of God. For existence itself is the most shared effect and the primary one deepest within all other effects.

That effect only God can produce of his own power; as the book of Causes® says, not even {the heavenly] intelligences can give existence unless God's power is in them. So God causes every activity inasmuch as every agent is the tool of God's active power. And in this way then, as regards the acting subjects, each particular agent causes its effect without intermediary, but as regards the powers by which they act, the higher agent's power is more immediate to the effect than that of any lower cause, since the power of the lower cause is only present to its effect through the power of the higher cause. So the book of Causes" says that the first cause's

God as the Beginning of Things power acts first in the effect and enters more vehemently into it. This presence of God's power within every acting thing is like the way the power of the heavenly bodies must be present in every acting elemental body. The difference is this: wherever God's power is God's very substance is, but the substance of heavenly bodies is not wherever their power is; and again God is his own power, but the heavenly body is not. So one can say that God is active within everything inasmuch as everything needs his power in order to act; but one can't say that the heavens [themselves}° act within the elements even if the elements are active through the heavens' power.

God then causes everything's activity inasmuch as he gives the power to act, maintains it in existence, applies it to its activity, and inasmuch as it is by his power that every other power acts. And when we add to this that God is his own power and therefore exists within everything, not as a part of its being but as holding it in existence, it follows that he is at work without intermediary in everything that is active, but without excluding the activity of nature or of free will.

Hence: to 1: Powers to act and be acted on are all that things in nature need for activity at their own level; nevertheless, they need God's power for the reasons already given... to 3: Nature isn't at work in the activity by which God initiates nature's activity, but God's power is at work in nature's own activity in the way a principal agent's power is at work in the activity of a tool. Nor is there anything to stop God and nature producing the same effect, since God and nature are hierarchically related... to 7: The natural powers given to things in nature when first instituted belong to them as forms existing stably and firmly in nature. What God contributes to a natural thing to make it actually active is only a something-in-transit, so to speak, existing incompletely, like colours do in the transmitting air or a carpenter's skill in the tool he uses. Such skill can contribute sharpness to a saw asa lasting form, but its own influence could only be contributed to the saw as a lasting

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? form by giving the saw a mind of its own. In the same way a natural thing can be given its own power as a lasting form, but the influence of the primary cause under which the thing acts as a tool to bring things into existence could only be given it by making it the source of all existence. Nor can God make a natural power that applies itself, or maintains itself in existence. Just as you can't makea tool that acts without being moved by the carpenter's skill, so you can't have things in nature that act without God acting in them... to 9: Though nature and will exist in utterly different ways they nevertheless act relatedly.

For willed activity presupposes nature's activity—the willed activity of arts and crafts needs the activities of nature—and nature's activity presupposes God's will as source of all natural change, so that all natural activities need his activity... to 12: God is not said to leave human beings in the hands of their own counsel as if that meant he didn't act in their wills; rather it means that he has given them a mastery over their actions whereby they aren't forced to one or other opposing course of action, a mastery he has not given to nature where a thing's form determines it to one course of action. to 13: The will is said to be mistress of its own action, not as if a primary cause was excluded, but because the primary cause doesn't act in our wills as it does in nature, determining us to one course of action. That determination of the action is left in the power of reason and will... to 16: God acts perfectly as primary cause, but needs nature's activity as secondary cause. God could of course produce the effects of nature without nature, but nevertheless wills them to be done through nature so that order be preserved in things.

[Article 8] And in the eighth place we are asked: Is God at work in nature creating? Or, equivalently: Is creation intermingled in the workings of nature?

[1] Because of Augustine's'' words: The apostle Paul, distinguishing God creating and forming from within from God as the Beginning of Things the workings of nature applied from without, uses an agricultural simile:

'I planted, Apollo watered, but God produced the growth.'

But it was said [by the respondent] that create is here used broadly to mean any kind of producing.

But against that: [2] Augustine appeals to Paul's authority in order to distinguish God's activity from that of creatures. Now he can do that if creation is interpreted strictly but not if it is broadly interpreted to mean any sort of production, for in that sense nature also creates: it produces an effect, as we showed in the previous question.

So Augustine must be talking of creation in a strict sense.

Moreover, [3] Augustine continues: Just as in our own lives only God can set hearts to rights though even human beings can preach the gospel externally, so God works within the things we see, creating them, and then—in the way agriculture is applied to the soil—applies to that nature of things within which he creates everything the external work of good and bad angels and men and animals of all sorts. Now God sets hearts to rights by an act of creation in the strict sense, for grace is said to be created. So natural forms must also be created by an act of creation in the strict sense.

But it was said [by the respondent] that natural forms differ from grace in having a cause in the subject that acquires them, so that to that extent grace can be said to be created in a strict sense whereas natural forms aren't.

[4] the gloss on Genesis 1 [1] says creation means making something from nothing. Now the preposition from sometimes indicates an agent cause

(as in 1 Corinthians 8 [6]: From whom and through whom all things) and sometimes a material cause (as in Tobias 13 [21-2]: all the surrounding walls were made from clean white stone). Saying something is made from nothing denies a material cause but not an agent cause

(for we don't deny God to be the agent cause of created things). Now natural forms may differ from grace in having their agent cause in the subject acquiring them,

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? but they resemble grace in existing in some material.

So that having a cause in their subject doesn't make creation any less applicable to them than to grace.

Moreover, [5] the forms of artefacts have no cause within their subjects but are wholly imposed from outside. So that if grace is to be called created because it has no cause in its subject then for the same reason the forms of artefacts must be created.

Moreover, [6] what doesn't contain matter can't come from matter. Now forms don't contain matter (for Aristotle'? says they differ both from matter and from all composites [of matter and form]); yet they come into existence, newly starting to exist. So it seems that they don't come from matter but from nothing, and must therefore be created.

But it was said [by the respondent] that though there is no matter in natural forms from which they came, there is nevertheless a matter in which they exist, and because of that they are not created.

But against that: (7] human souls, like the forms of other things in nature, are forms existing in matter, and yet they are said to be created. So why can't one say the same of all other forms in nature?

But it was said [by the respondent] that the human soul is nota realized potentiality of matter like other natural forms.

But against that: [8] you can't bring out what isn't in.

Now until reproduction is complete the form to be reproduced doesn't exist in the matter, for if it did opposing forms would be coexisting in the matter. So natural forms can't be brought out of matter.

Moreover, [9] the form to be reproduced appears only when reproduction is complete. So if it existed beforehand it existed hidden, and that implies Anaxagoras' thesis that everything lies hidden in everything, a thesis

Aristotle'? disproved.

But it was said [by the respondent] that until reproduction is complete the natural form exists in matter but incompletely, not completely as Anaxagoras held.

God as the Beginning of Things But against that: [10] if form exists in any way in matter before reproduction is complete, some part of it pre-exists there, and if it isn't there completely, some part of it doesn't pre-exist there. This would mean form has parts and is composite, which contradicts the first words of the Six Principles.'*

Moreover, [11] if it doesn't completely pre-exist in the matter and must be completed later, the completion must come through reproduction. Now the completion didn't pre-exist in the matter, for then the form would have been there completely. So at least this completion will have been created.

But it was said [by the respondent] that it partially pre-existed in the matter not by some part of it being there, but because it was there in a different way before and after: first potentially and then actually.

But against that: [12] whatever changes its way of being is being modified not reproduced. If then all nature does is to make actual a form that is already there potentially, then there is no reproduction in nature but only modification.

Moreover, [13] the only sources of natural activity here below are incidental properties: fire, for example, acts through its property of heat, and so on. Now activity of properties can't cause substantial forms, since no agent can transcend its species: effects can't surpass their causes in the way substantial forms surpass incidental properties.

Substantial forms then can't be the product of natural activity here below, and so must be created.

Moreover, [14] the imperfect can't cause the perfect. Now soul's power is present only imperfectly in animal semen; so the natural activity semen is capable of can't produce an animal's soul. That must be created, and so, by the same token, must all other natural forms.

Moreover, [15] what itself is inanimate and non-living can't cause an animate living thing. But rotting matter produces animals that are animate living things; and yet we can't find any natural living things giving them life. So their souls must

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? come from the first living thing; and by the same token so must all other natural forms.

Moreover, [16] what nature does reflects what it is; but the nature of some generated diving things doesn't reflect any generating nature: mules don't resemble in species horses or donkeys. So a mule's form can't come from natural activity but requires creation; which leads to the same conclusion as before.

Moreover, [17] Augustine! says that things in nature would not have forms that formed them unless there was some first source of their forming. But that is God himself. So all forms are created by God.

Moreover, [18] Boethius!® says forms in matter derive from forms not in matter. In the context forms not in matter must mean ideas in God's mind, for angels—which might also be called forms not in matter—don't cause natural forms, as Augustine!" says. So forms in nature don't come from the activity of nature but from the creator giver.

Moreover, [19] we read in the book of Causes!® that existence is created. But for that to be true forms must be created, since it is forms which determine things to exist.

Forms then are created. So God works in nature by creating something, namely, the forms.

Moreover, [20] things that don't exist of themselves are caused by things that do exist of themselves. Now the forms of natural things don't exist of themselves but only in matter; their cause then must be a form that stands by itself. So the forms of nature must be created by an external agent, and this it seems is God's work in nature: to create the forms.

[1] We distinguish God's work of creation from his work of management and propagation. But natural activity is part of this work of management and propagation. So there is no creation involved in the workings of nature.

Moreover, [2] only God can create. If then forms are created, they must come straight from God, which means all activity of nature—the goal of which is form—is useless.

God as the Beginning of Things Moreover, [3] incidental forms, just like substantial forms, have no matter in them. So if that was a reason for saying substantial forms are created, it must also mean incidental forms are. Now just as things generated are completed by their substantial form, so they are disposed by accidental forms. So a thing in nature won't have any part in generation, whether completing it or disposing to it, and so all natural activity will be useless.

Moreover, [4] nature is procreated like from like: what is generated is like what generates it in species and form. So the very form of what is generated must be being produced by the act of generation, avd not by creation.

Moreover, [5] the same effect doesn't come from different agents. But what is made from matter and form is one thing.

So it can't be that one agent disposes the matter and another brings the form. Now what disposes the matter is natural agents. So they must bring the form. Thus forms are not created, and creation isn't intermingled in the work of nature, In reply:

All the various answers given to this question seem to be based on one and the same principle: that nature can't make something from nothing. This principle led some people to believe things come into existence only by being drawn out of hidden pre-existence in some other thing: an opinion

Aristotle? attributed to Anaxagoras. He seems to have been led astray by confusing potential with actual existence, believing anything nature produces must actually pre-exist.

Now it must exist potentially (so that it doesn't come into existence from nothing), but it needn't actually pre-exist (that would stop it coming to exist, since what exists can't come to exist).

But because products exist potentially in their material and actually when that material acquires a form, some people hold that the material pre-exists and things come into existence only as to their forms. So, since nature can't produce from nothing but must presuppose something, these people believe nature's only work is to dispose material for a Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? form, the form itself—which isn't presupposed and must come into existence—coming from an agent which presupposes nothing and produces from nothing: an agent beyond nature, called by Plato the form-giver, identified by Ibn Sina with the lowest intelligence among the separate substances, but said by several modern followers of theirs to be God. Now this doesn't seem right. Since things are such that what they do reflects what they are—an agent must actually be what the object of its activity potentially is—no natural parent would need to resemble its offspring in form of substance unless by its action it produced that offspring's substantial form. Moreover, because what the offspring is to acquire actually exists in the natural parent (and what things do reflects what they are) it seems wrong to look for another agent beyond and outside the parent.

So note that just as the former opinion arose from ignorance of what matter is, these opinions seem to arise from ignorance of what forms are. Forms don't exist in nature in the same sense as products of nature do: for these products exist in the strict sense, possessing an existence of their own in which they subsist, whereas forms don't subsist with an existence of their own, existing not in the strict sense but only in the sense that something exists because of them.

Thus incidental properties exist only in the sense that they qualify or quantify substances, not in the sense that they make substances exist simply speaking as substantial forms do, so that incidental properties are better said to belong in existence than to exist, as Aristotle?° says. Now things come into existence in the same sense in which they exist, since existence is where coming into existence ends up. So what comes into its own existence in the strict sense is the thing composed of matter and form; in the strict sense form is not what comes into existence but that by which or by acquiring which [the composed] thing comes into existence. So the principle that in nature nothing comes into existence from nothing doesn't stop us saying that nature produces substantial forms, for what comes into existence is not the form but the thing composed [of matter and form], and that doesn't come from nothing but from matter; and it comes

God as the Beginning of Things indeed from matter potential of that composite because potential of that form, so that it is not strictly correct to say form comes into existence in the matter, but rather that it is brought out of matter's potentiality. Now from this very fact that it is not forms but things composed [of matter and form] that come into existence, Aristotle"? shows that forms come from natural agents; for since what is made must reflect what makes it and what is made is a composite of matter and form, so too what makes it must be composite and not, as Plato said, a form existing by itself. Thus, just as what is made is composite but comes into existence by having its form realized in its matter, so its natural cause is composite—not a form by itself—though it acts through its form: and J mean through the form as it exists in this matter, in this flesh and these bones and other like parts.

Hence: to 1: Augustine's words ascribe to God a work of creation within the workings of nature, because nature's powers were imprinted in matter when God first created it, not because something is created every time nature is at work. to 2: Augustine uses the word create strictly; not, however, with reference to the effect of nature, but to the powers by which nature acts and which were imprinted in nature when

God created it. to 3: Grace is a form and not a subsistent entity, and so it's not strictly true to say that it itself exists or comes into existence; nor then is it created in the way subsistent substances are. However, the instilling of grace is akin to creation in having no cause in its subject, neither an agent cause, nor the sort of material natural forms have, in which they exist potentially and can be brought to realization by some natural agent's activity.

So now the answer to 4 is obvious. When we say something is made from nothing we deny it any material cause. And when a form can't be brought to realization out of the natural potentiality of its material, that is akin to not having any matter.

Is God at Work in Nature and in Will? to 5: Although no natural agency gives rise to the forms of artefacts, such forms don't transcend nature's level as grace does; indeed they exist at a lower level, since to exist in nature is a more excellent thing than to exist as an artefact. to 6:

If forms came to exist in the strict sense that selfsubsistent things do, then, since they don't contain matter, they would have to be created. to 7: Although human souls exist in matter they are not realizations of some potentiality of matter, for their mental activities show that by nature they transcend the whole realm of matter. Moreover, such forms are self-subsistent things able to go on existing when their bodies decompose. to 8: Until reproduction is complete the form to be reproduced doesn't actually exist in the matter, but it does exist there potentially. And there's nothing wrong with one form existing actually and its opposite existing potentially.

And that makes obvious the answer to 9, for Anaxagoras believed forms did actually pre-exist in matter but in a hidden way. to 10: Form pre-exists in matter imperfectly, not by one part being actually present and another absent, but by the whole pre-existing potentially and then the whole being brought to actuality.

And that makes obvious the answer to 11, for clearly form's existence in matter is not perfected by adding something else that wasn't potentially there in the matter. to 12: Potential and actual existence are not the sort of incidentally different modes of being that make modification possible, but substantially different ways of existing, for substances too exist potentially or actually just as other categories of being do. to 13: Incidental properties act as tools of substantial forms in the way Aristotle'? says fire is a tool of our digestive powers, so there's nothing wrong with activity of properties resulting in a substantial form. to 14: In semen too the semen's heat acts as a tool of the power of soul present in the semen (imperfectly present but God as the Beginning of Things deriving from a perfect presence in the parent) and also as a sort of tool of the power of the heavenly bodies. This is why we don't say semen does the reproducing, but animals with the co-operation of the sun. to 15: The animals generated in rotting material are less perfect than other animals, so that in their generation the power of heavenly bodies acting on earthly matter is sufficient to do what in the generation of more perfect animals is done by a co-operation of that same heavenly power with the semen's power. to 16: Although mules are not the same species as either horses or donkeys they are close family, and that family resemblance enables a sort of intermediate species to be generated from differing species. to 17: Just as God's power is the first of agents and yet doesn't exclude the power of nature, so too God is the first pattern of things and yet doesn't exclude things deriving their form from other lower forms acting to produce forms similar to themselves.

And that makes clear the answer to 18, for Boethius understands forms in matter to derive from forms not in matter as from an ultimate, not an immediate, pattern. to 19: Existence is said to be created in the sense that every secondary cause that gives existence has that power as a tool of the first creator cause, existence being the first of all effects which presupposes nothing else. to 20: Natural forms in matter can't be derived from any form of the same species existing by itself, since natural forms all contain matter by definition, but they are derived from forms existing by themselves in the way we have said.

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