Chapter 5: Invisibles

5

Invisibles

Spirit as Subsistent Form, Angels in Philosophy, and Reason’s Glimpse of God

Back to the Soul: Substantial Form, Subsistent Form

Why is it that the metaphysician’s consideration of material things from the point of view of being points him toward immaterial things? One reason, perhaps the crucial one, is that he finds the being of material things depending primarily on that immaterial factor within them to which we have already given so much attention: substantial form.321 Although a material thing’s being depends on both its matter and its form, it depends much more truly and properly on the form. This, again, is because a being, in the proper sense, is something in act, and because a thing is in act through and according to a form. “Every esse whatsoever is according to some form.”322 Matter is only potency. Perhaps not every actual being has matter, but every one must have a form. Physics considers form insofar as it is in matter; metaphysics considers form, certainly insofar as it is separate from matter, but also and first of all just insofar as it is form.323 Form is itself a cause of being, inasmuch as it is being; so much so that Thomas says metaphysics “maximally” considers the formal cause.324

It is by considering form as cause of being to matter that we can discern the very possibility of beings that exist separately from matter. Thomas explains: between “any things which are so related that one is cause of being to the other, that which functions as cause can have being without the other, but not conversely.”325 And so matter cannot be without form, but form can be without matter. Of course, as he goes on to acknowledge, many specific kinds of form—and nearly all the kinds that we are familiar with—do depend on matter. But he is saying that the very nature of form, as form, does not depend on matter.

I would venture to say that, for Thomas, it is only this intellectual experience of form, as cause of being to matter—that is, substantial form—which gives us the possibility of framing some positive notion of immaterial reality. It is nothing other than the notion of form at an especially high grade of perfection. If we try to conceive immaterial reality without reference to form, we will almost certainly end up, despite ourselves, thinking of it as corporeal, a “refined ethereal medium.”326 If we are not actually thinking of a body—say, some kind of gas—it will still be something only able to be found in bodies, something that presupposes extension; electricity, radiation, or some other type of physical energy.327 These things are at best additions. They do function as principles of motion and change, but they are not the most fundamental principles, giving a body its very unity and being. We get beyond extension only by getting underneath it.

It is also crucial that, in surveying the forms of bodily things, we find some depending on matter less than others. We saw this in chapter 3. Living form is not as tied to the matter that it is in as is non-living form. The souls of animals are principles of activity that rises above matter—cognitive and appetitive activity. Our soul’s intellectual activity is not intrinsically material at all, although it is connected with sensation, which has a material dimension. What we must now consider is what the human soul’s activity implies about its status as a being. This is, as it were, our precise point of entry into the purely immaterial domain.

First, let us go back for a moment to the notion of substance. A substance is a being in the primary and most proper sense. It is a being per se, in virtue of itself. This does not mean having no cause distinct from itself. It means being a true subject of existence or of being (esse). A substance subsists. Non-substances can be spoken of in the manner of subjects, but they are not really so. Rather, they only somehow attach or relate to substances. At most, they serve as principles by which the substance somehow is. Accidents make a substance be in some qualified way—be warm, be tall, be courageous. Substantial forms make substances be without qualification. This, however, means that a substantial form does not really inhere in its substance, as though it presupposed the substance already constituted and were merely added on. It is constitutive of the substance, and what it presupposes and inheres in is only prime matter.

Now, Thomas holds that, just as substances are what properly are or exist, so also they are what properly act or do things. Every substance has some activity that is typical of it; and every activity belongs to some substance as its proper subject. Just as what is hot, properly speaking, is not heat, but what has heat—a hot body, which is a substance—so too what heats is the hot body and not its heat. “Nothing operates in virtue of itself”—that is, nothing is a true subject of operation—“except what exists in virtue of itself. For operating only belongs to what is a being in act, and so something operates in the mode in which it is. On this account, we do not say that heat heats, but that a hot thing does.”328

At the same time, Thomas does allow that the parts of a substance may be said to act or to do things. It is more proper to say that the whole acts, but it is not improper to say that the part does so. For instance, the subject performing the activity of seeing the screen in front of me is I. But I am doing it with my eyes and not (say) with my feet. Different parts are organs, instruments, of different activities, and each activity belong to the whole organism by way of its proper organ. We distinguish the organs by their distinct powers for activity. Ultimately my sight is in me, but most immediately it is in my eyes—and not in my feet. So, therefore, is the activity of seeing. Hence, in a secondary, but not improper sense, we can say that my eyes are seeing the screen. And by the same token, we can say that my eyes are true subjects of being. They subsist, even if only as parts. Aristotle does acknowledge that the parts of substances are substances too.329

With these preliminaries, consider now the activity of human understanding. We have already seen Thomas’s arguments to show that the power of understanding neither is a body nor is seated in a bodily organ.330 But it cannot be free-floating. If it is not a substance in its own right, then there must be some substance to which it belongs. Of course, it belongs to a human being. But does it belong to the whole human being immediately, or does it do so by way of some part, as sight belongs to me by way of my eyes? If I am indeed corporeal, then understanding cannot belong to me immediately. It cannot have a body for its proper seat. So it must belong to me by way of some part. But that part cannot be corporeal either. The only possible candidate is my soul itself. Most properly, it is I who understand. But in a valid, proper sense, my soul understands, just as my eyes see.

And this means that my soul itself is a substance, in the sense in which my eyes are. It is a genuine subject of activity, albeit a partial one, and hence it is also a genuine, albeit partial, subject of being. It subsists. Thomas stresses that the soul only subsists and acts as a part does.331 It is not the whole subject of one’s being or one’s life; that is, it is not one’s whole self. Thomas famously says, “my soul is not I.”332 A human soul is not a human person.333 But it does properly exist, and it properly lives, just as a person’s bodily parts do.

Or rather, it does so even more truly than they do. For a person’s bodily parts, and the whole person, exist and live by virtue of the soul, but the soul exists and lives in an immediate way, by virtue of itself. This is simply to say that it is at once a subsistent form and the first formal principle, the substantial form, of the person and of each of his or her bodily parts.334

Now it is easy for us, I think, to feel a tension between saying that the soul subsists or is a substance, even a partial one, and saying that it is a form of the body, even the substantial form. One reason for the tension, I suppose, is that we tend to think of forms as accidents, added on to bodies that are already constituted. But even once we achieve some grasp of substantial form, there may still be a tension, because we still tend to think of subsistents and substances as bodies. One bodily part may help keep another part going, but it cannot be the other’s formal principle. Either the two bodily parts have distinct formal principles and are not parts of a single substance with a single being, but rather two substances joined together in mechanical fashion; or else they share in a single formal principle that is distinct from both and that informs and gives being and unity to the whole. So it is hard for us to think of the soul as subsisting, having being in itself, without either thinking of it and the body as two substances, each with its own distinct being, or else imagining the need for yet some other formal principle giving being and unity to the whole. But the soul itself is the formal principle of the whole, and it shares the very being that it has in itself with the body’s matter, so as to constitute the whole.335

Perhaps, however, what we most need to see is that the soul’s subsistence is not merely an ad hoc answer to the question of what it is that intellectual activity and power are seated in. Here I think it helps to consider that, whether or not the soul is the intellect’s seat, it is at least the intellect’s immediate source, as it is of all the vital powers. This is not at all ad hoc; it is merely to say that the human soul is the human animal’s nature—first inner principle, not only of being, but also of activity. Intellectual power is a proper effect of the human soul. But an effect cannot be more perfect or more noble than its proper cause. Intellect is an extremely noble power, an “absolute form,” not intrinsically conditioned by matter. Its origin can only be a substantial form that is proportionally perfect. I mean, proportionally perfect as form, as principle of being. It must not be wholly conditioned by matter, even in its being.336 It must be so strong, with respect to being, that it is not just a principle of the being to which the body is subject, but also and first of all a (partial) subject of that being in its own right. And this is as much as to say that only a subsistent form can fully account for the activity of understanding.

Moreover, precisely because it is so perfect, the subsistent soul is an even stronger cause of bodily unity than are other forms and souls. A sign of this is the extraordinary complexity of the human body.337 Its unifying principle must be especially potent.

Almost Separate Form

But of course the body does die and corrupt. The soul is not so strong as to be able to prevent that. The body’s matter can take on a new form or forms incompatible with the soul. Now, if the human soul were not subsistent, as other forms of bodies and other souls are not, there would be no question of its fate at the corruption of the body. Such forms are never subjects of being in the first place; such souls are never properly alive in their own right. Strictly speaking they cannot even be said to have come into being. They only did so in an indirect way, as the endpoints of the processes by which the bodies that they inform came into being. With such a form, the action by which the body began is the action by which the form began to be. And the body’s cessation is the form’s cessation. By contrast, whether or not the human soul can ever cease to be, the body’s cessation cannot be simply identified with its cessation. This again is because the soul subsists.338

Here the comparison with bodily parts is helpful. The necrosis of one part of the body cannot be simply identified with that of another. This is true even if the necrosis of one leads to that of another. Similarly, even if the human soul does cease to be, does die, perhaps as a result of the body’s death, it must have its own death, either simultaneous with the body’s or subsequent to it, but not identical with it.

But the soul cannot die, cannot corrupt. Thomas’s mature argument for this is a banner text for the role of form in his metaphysics.339 It is extremely simple. He declares:

To corrupt is altogether impossible, not just for it [the human soul], but for any subsistent thing that is nothing but form. For it is evident that what belongs to something by virtue of itself is inseparable from it. But being (esse) belongs to form, which is act, by virtue of itself. Hence matter acquires being in act inasmuch as it acquires a form, and corruption occurs in it inasmuch as the form is separated from it. But it is impossible that a form be separated from itself. Hence it is impossible that a subsistent form cease to be.340

Notice how strongly he puts it: the soul’s ceasing to be is impossible. That means that its being is necessary. He is saying that the human soul is not a contingent entity. We probably find this odd, at least at first, because at first we probably take it to mean that the soul’s being is what we call a logical necessity, i.e., that its not being would entail a contradiction.341 Thomas does not mean that. In this same article, he says that if God withdrew His conserving influence, the soul would be annihilated.342 Yet this does not make it contingent. Rather, it means, in part, that the soul’s necessity is a caused necessity.343 It also means that logical necessity is not the only kind of necessity that Thomas recognizes. In fact, it is not the only kind of absolute necessity.344 Absolute necessity is necessity rooted in the necessary thing’s own nature, and Thomas also calls it natural necessity.345 It means that the thing has no principle, no potency or “possibility” in itself, for being otherwise. But its being otherwise may not involve a sheer contradiction.

The necessity of the soul’s being is of this sort. The soul’s nature has nothing in it whereby the soul can corrupt, no potential for not being. Only a subsistent thing that has matter, with potential for a form that is incompatible with the thing’s own form, has in its own nature a potential not to be. Such a thing can be destroyed by being acted upon in such a way that its form is replaced with another. A soul cannot be acted upon in this way. It cannot be killed, even by God. There can be no such thing as a dead soul or a soul-cadaver. It is only a creature, and God was free to make it or not. But He made it to last.

Thomas’s treatment of the soul’s condition after its separation from the body is extremely interesting, but here I will only sum up very quickly what he seems to think that mere natural reason can determine about it. Perhaps the most important thing is simply that the soul never was, and never becomes, an angel. That is, it remains a naturally partial entity. When separate, it can exercise some intellectual activity, not unlike that of angels, but only in a confused way.346 In order to have clear and distinct knowledge, it needs the help of the senses. It always has the nature of a form that is apt and inclined to inform and give being to matter.347 Separation is unnatural for it.

Separate souls also always remain distinct from each other. Each soul informs a distinct body, and at separation each retains the same distinct existence—the same individual life—that it enjoyed in the body. This means that the existence and life of the person to whom it belonged is not altogether extinguished at death. And this in turn means that the whole person’s coming back to life is not inconceivable.348 This would not happen by the soul’s rejoining just any body whatsoever; Thomas argues that the idea of reincarnation in a non-human body, or in any body other than that of the person to whom the soul originally belonged, erroneously implies that the union of soul and body is merely accidental rather than substantial.349 A person comes back to life only by his or her soul’s being reunited to his or her same body—however different in quality the body may then be.350

This is all very abstract and remote from our experience. For Thomas, that is as it should be. The experiential condition of a separate soul must be so utterly different from our present condition that any attempt to convey it would be merely misleading. If there is a future that we can in any way imagine, it is the resurrection. And only then will we be alive again.

The resurrection is suitable, but supernatural, miraculous.351 Thomas does believe such a miracle will occur. But unlike the soul’s immortality, he does not think the future resurrection can be proved philosophically.352 Philosophy can prove that all things depend on God’s will and that He can work miracles, but not that His will is determined to a miracle of a given sort.

Angels

The human soul, even after death, is by nature the form of a body, although it does not then actually inform one. But now we must talk about forms that are not by nature forms of bodies and that always exist separately, by themselves. This may sound odd. How can there be a form that is not the form of anything? Thomas, however, would reject that question. A form that is not the form of a body can still be the form of something; namely, of itself. “Nothing is its own matter, nor is anything its own active principle. But something is its own form, as is clear in all immaterial things.”353 He is talking about the Persons of the Trinity and the suitability of saying that they are “of one essence.” In this expression, he says, essence is signified in its function of form.

A thing’s form is that by which it is in act. An immaterial thing is already, immediately in act, by virtue of itself, not by any formal principle distinct from itself.354 So it is its own form. This is not, after all, so odd, if we keep in mind that even a form of a body is at least part of that which is in act by virtue of it. For that which is in act is not the matter alone, but the composite, the whole body. The form is part of the body that it informs and actualizes. In this sense, the form of the body is its own form too.

Now of course, on Thomas’s view, the highest principle and cause of all, and that about which the metaphysician chiefly seeks to know the truth, is a single being, God. And we have already heard him locating God at the summit of immateriality.355 In Thomas’s metaphysical vision, however, God is by no means the only being that naturally exists apart from matter. There are other so-called separate substances. Sometimes, especially in philosophical contexts, he will call them intelligences or intellects or minds.356 But he identifies them with what Scripture calls angels.

What is more, Thomas often follows Aristotle in saying that metaphysics reaches to the highest and most universal causes, in the plural. In some cases, we might conjecture that what he has in mind is that, although God is one being, He exercises several types of causality: efficient, exemplar, and final.357 Sometimes, however, it is clear that among the “universal and primary causes of being,” he means to include not only God but also the angels. Yet, as is obvious, angels are supposed to be caused beings, creatures. Thomas may seem to be minimizing the difference between creature and creator and to be making the one God, as it were, a mere first among equals.

As it turns out, however, the universality of the causality that Thomas ascribes to angels is only qualified. Angels are not causes of common being as a whole. In that case, they would be causes of themselves, since they exist by sharing in common being. No creature can be a cause of the very nature of being, nor can it cause everything that pertains to the being of a thing. It cannot produce something ex nihilo or create.358 Nor can it produce prime matter.359 But angels would have a certain universal causality with respect to material things, at least as to their motions. Thomas follows Aristotle in positing a multitude of separate substances as the immediate causes of the perpetual rotations of the celestial bodies. The very first cause is God, but Thomas thinks that the rotations are probably executed by lower separate substances acting under God’s command. He finds this view in Aristotle, and he also gives reasons of his own for it.360 All movement on earth depends on the influence of the celestial bodies, and the terrestrial movements include the cyclical processes to which all generable and corruptible things—all earthly things—are subject. Thus, by governing all earthly movements, angels cooperate with God in conserving the very being of all the generable and corruptible kinds of things. So they have a qualified sort of universal causality even with respect to being.

Why does a cause of this sort have to be immaterial? Once again, the study of the soul helps. As was stressed in the discussion of cognition, the more immaterial a form is, the greater its amplitude and extension. A form naturally subsisting apart from matter is by that very fact intellectual. And its intellectuality is nobler than ours. It does not depend on sense-cognition. The angelic knowledge of corporeal things is not caused by or abstracted from the things. And unlike our intellects, theirs can know material individuals directly, through likenesses infused in them by the creator of matter. For that very reason, they can have a much fuller and extensive share in causing material things than we can.361

Obviously Thomas’s cosmology is outdated. Many twentieth-century interpreters, however, held that even in his own purely philosophical thought, angels have, at best, a tenuous place. The only firm basis for affirming their existence would be revelation. This would be chiefly because Thomas’s philosophy arrives at a first cause that is omnipotent and all-embracing, able to effect anything that can be a being.362 As a result, any visible phenomena, such as the celestial rotations, that might be adduced in proof of angelic causes, could instead be caused immediately by God. The interpreters did notice that Thomas also offers arguments based on what he takes to be an end that God can be assumed to intend in the world and that would require angels as part of its realization.363 But such arguments were judged merely probable, showing only the suitability of the existence of angels, not strictly proving it. A recent study, however, has shown persuasively that Thomas takes those arguments to be solid proofs.364 Moreover, we should notice what Thomas himself takes to be the implications of God’s all-embracing causality. Far from rendering other causes unnecessary or dubious, it actually offers a further motive for supposing them; and all the more so, the more their causality resembles His—which is to say, the more universal it is, less confined to “here and now.”365

Thomas says, and by now it should come as no surprise, that whereas metaphysics considers material substances only insofar as they are substances and beings, not insofar as they are material, it considers immaterial substances insofar as they are immaterial.366 What he means by immaterial is not a mere negation, not just absence of matter. Although he does not judge matter positively bad, he does see it as limiting or contracting the forms that inhere in it, in themselves and in their efficacy. Immateriality stands for a high grade of perfection of form, and hence of being and of causality. It pertains to the very notion of the causes that the metaphysician is primarily seeking.

We still have to consider how Thomas distinguishes angelic form from the form of the very highest cause. I shall especially want to stress that Thomas thinks there really is such a thing as the form of the highest cause. Why I do so will emerge as we proceed.

That a God Exists

This book is called a sketch of Thomas’s philosophy. What I shall be able to say about his philosophy of God is more like a sketch of a sketch. All the points that I shall treat do, I think, play fundamental roles. The same, however could be said of many others that I shall not treat, and I hope the gaps will not result in a picture that is distorted in content or in spirit. But space is limited; and in any case, my sense is that, in a merely philosophical presentation, it is better, and more in keeping with Thomas’s own approach, to err on the side of restraint.

Thomas thinks that normal human experience provides a source from which almost anyone can draw a kind of spontaneous inference of there being something divine—something that governs the world and that constitutes a suitable object of worship.367 The inference has nothing like the force or clarity of a scientific proof, and the conception of the deity that is formed on its basis may be quite crude. It might be a body; it might be nature itself; it might be an especially powerful human being.368 But Thomas also thinks there are paths of rational reflection that serve both to verify the reality of the divine in a scientific manner and to refine the conception of it.369 In Summa theologiae, I, q. 2, a. 3, he famously traces five such paths or ways. His own words leave no doubt that he considers them scientific (in the Aristotelian sense). He calls them ways by which there being a God “can be proved.” Clearly he is seeing them as fitting within his own account, in the immediately preceding article, of the sort of demonstration—the sort of scientific proof—that can be had of there being a God.

Thomas does not present these proofs as necessary prerequisites to faith. He knows that many people take it on faith that there is a God, and he thinks that they may well be doing so quite reasonably. In fact, he seems to hold that nearly everyone must first accept it on faith, assimilating the rational proofs only later, if ever. This is for several reasons: because the proofs are very subtle and abstract; because a good deal of prior knowledge is needed (recall the order of learning); and because many people are just too busy with the cares of life.370

Some interpreters have tried to reduce all five ways to one. It seems to me that this does not really fit Thomas’s intention. Each way is a different window onto the truth about the deity and presents it under a different guise. The Summa’s subsequent treatment of what can and cannot be attributed to God draws now on one, now on another of the conceptions of Him that the various ways provide. Still, it is also true that these conceptions have a good deal in common. Running through all of them is a general notion which, though highly abstract, captures what Thomas regards as the core of the meaning of the word deus: “something existing above all things that is principle of all and removed from all.”371 We might say: something more perfect than all the rest, on which all the rest depends, and which is quite distinct from all the rest.

Remarkably, Thomas thinks deus means the same for Christians and for pagans.372 Where they differ is in how they apply it. This should be kept in mind in reading the five ways. Their aim is, in a sense, fairly modest. It is not to prove that there is a being with all the features that we have come to associate with the name of God: omnipotence, omniscience, eternity, incorporeity, etc. He takes these up in later discussions. He even takes up God’s unity later. (He does think it possible to prove that there is only one God.373) But he denies that deus is a proper name (which is how we tend to treat it). It is not like Socrates, but like man. It means whatever has a certain nature, the divine nature, whether that be one or many.374 In Englishing this, a God or the God would be better than just God. At any rate, in the five ways Thomas only wants to show that there must be some being, at least one, that merits the name deus.

Each of the five ways fixes on some aspect of things in our experience and proceeds to show how it entails the influence of something worthy to be called a God. By “influence” I mean efficient causality.375 The first three ways, and also the fifth, acknowledge or even insist on other efficient causes standing between the aspect originally invoked and the highest, divine cause. The fourth does not. For various reasons, I shall look at it after the others.

Let me give just a very quick review of the first three ways. The first starts from the observation of some motion. It reasons to a primary source of motion, one whose action of moving things does not depend on its own being moved, by anything—either by others (in that case it would not be primary) or even by itself (nothing moves itself)—and which is therefore entirely unmoved. Between this mover and the motion first observed there can be a whole series of secondary, moved movers, but not an infinite multitude of them, since that would exclude a primary mover. The second way starts directly with the existence of efficient causes and of order among them, such that the causality of one depends on another. Think of an army, or the parts of an animal. Such a series needs a primary, uncaused efficient cause. The third way starts from things that have in themselves the potential both to be and not to be.376 It argues that not everything can be of this sort; such things depend on something that can only be, something absolutely necessary. But some necessary things have a cause of their necessity outside themselves. There must be a primary necessary being that has no such cause and that causes the necessity of the others.

The fifth way relies heavily on the notion that was the focus of chapter 2, the notion of nature. This way centers on natural things that do not have cognition. What Thomas gives us in the Summa is, in effect, a very synthetic presentation of the discussion offered in Aristotle’s Physics, Book II, of nature as a cause that acts for an end.377 And in his own commentary on that discussion, Thomas spells out at considerably greater length the argument given in the fifth way.378 Here I would like to call attention to just two points about the argument. The first regards the basic phenomenon that it invokes: the fact that natural things lacking cognition usually act in such a way as to attain what is best. In the Summa presentation, he does not say what “best” means; he does not specify the good with respect to which the way of acting is deemed best. But in the Physics commentary it is clear. It is the good of the thing’s own kind, and chiefly the kind’s very conservation in being.379 He is saying that the way things usually act yields results that, on the whole, favor the good of their kinds more than does any of the other results that they may, on rare occasions, bring about.

The other point is what exactly, in the fifth way, God is supposed to explain. “Things without cognition do not tend to an end unless they are directed by a cognizing and intelligent agent, as the arrow is directed by the archer.” The thought is not at all that there are events in the physical world which the natures of physical things do not explain and which only a divine intelligence does. Thomas has no hesitation in affirming that the natures of physical things explain physical events; but those very natures themselves need a further explanation. It is not that natural causes are being coordinated, or adjusted, or supplemented, by a divine cause. It is that the very causality of natural causes depends on divine causality.380 Thomas does not side-step nature to reach God.

Much less does he eliminate it. Heidegger criticizes the doctrine of creation for turning the world into a work of divine craft, thereby suppressing the ancient experience of nature and paving the way for the modern technological attitude toward things. But right there in the Physics commentary, Thomas presents a radical difference between divine and human craft. “A nature,” he says, “is nothing other than a conception (ratio) of a certain craft—namely, the divine—instilled in things, by which the things themselves move toward a determinate end; as if the craftsman who makes a ship could give it to pieces of wood to move of themselves toward taking on the form of a ship.”381 By our craft we can affect the accidental dispositions of things, but we cannot instill the craft itself into the things or make it their inner principle of activity, their nature. God’s mind causes natures. Our minds only imitate them. We will return to that point in the final chapter.

As for Thomas’s notion of creation, however, the way that brings us closest to it is the fourth.382 This is the one way that has no room for intermediate causes between God and the effect that is being traced to Him for its full explanation. The reason for this seems clear. The effect in question is the “being (esse), goodness, and any other perfection,” of absolutely “all beings” (omnibus entibus). It is nothing short of all reality, or at least, all the perfection in reality. But nothing is a cause (an efficient cause) except by virtue of some perfection in it; nothing acts except insofar as it is in act, and every act is some sort of perfection. So, if anything other than God, any of the “beings,” were an intermediate cause of this effect, it would be acting as its own efficient cause. That was already judged impossible in the second way. It would mean that a thing is prior to itself.383

To be sure, this raises a question about God’s own status as a being. Is He not part of reality too—is that not the very thing the five ways try to show? I shall discuss this later.

What is it about the perfections in things that shows the need for this universal cause? According to the fourth way, it is the unequal manner in which the perfections are distributed among the things, especially the perfection of being.384 They are found in varying grades of strength, magis et minus. This indicates that not all things have them on their own. If they did, they would all have them to the maximum. The unequal distribution shows that this is not the case. Rather, things must have these perfections through the influence of a source that does have them to the maximum, as the heat in a house, stronger in some rooms than in others, comes from the fire in the hearth.385

Later in the Summa, very succinctly, Thomas shows us how this argument is connected with creation. To create is to produce something out of nothing, which is to say, not out of anything. No sort of matter is presupposed to the creator’s action. God produces absolutely everything that enters into the creature’s constitution; “nothing can be in beings (in entibus), unless it is from God.” The reason for this is simply that He is the “universal cause of all being (totius esse).”386 And this was just how the fourth way presented Him.

However, the fourth way does not mean to show that God produced the world in a beginning of time. If we take the word creation to imply a temporal beginning, then the fourth way does not quite reach God as creator. No merely rational argument does. Thomas does not think the world’s having a temporal beginning can be proved. That must be accepted on faith, as something God freely decided.387 But the interesting thing is that Thomas does think that God’s producing the world out of nothing, in the sense of not out of anything, can be proved. This means proving that He causes even matter. And this is the very reason why no temporal beginning is implied. Because creation presupposes no material substrate, it is not really a process or a change (although we cannot help imagining a change and speaking of it as though it involved one).388 The action of creating does not consist in bringing a subject from one state or condition to another. It is nothing but a causal relation, which takes no time, and need have no beginning.

That God, and God Alone, Is His Being Itself

The fourth way is often said to be the most Platonic of the five ways. That may well be so. Of all the ways, however, the fourth is the only one that actually cites any other author; and the author cited (twice) is Aristotle. The references are to the passage mentioned earlier, from Metaphysics II, about the correlation between how things are in truth and how they are in being, and about how that which has a feature to the highest degree is cause of that feature in everything else. Thomas almost seems to have anticipated the judgment that the fourth way is Platonic, and to have wanted to insist that it is not, for that reason, less Aristotelian.

In fact, on the subject of God’s universal causality, Thomas finds Plato and Aristotle in considerable agreement. Especially insistent upon this agreement is a passage from one of his most mature writings, the little treatise on angels called De substantiis separatis.389 Over and above the mode of becoming (modum fiendi) that is by the transformation of matter, he says,

it is necessary, in the judgment of Plato and Aristotle, to posit another, higher one. For since the first principle must be most simple, it must not be posited to be as participating in esse, but as being an esse itself. And since there can only be one subsistent esse, as has already been shown, all the other things, which are below it, must be thus, as participating in esse. Hence in all things of this sort there must come about a certain common resolution, according to which each of them is resolved by the intellect into that which is (id quod est) and its esse. Therefore, above the mode of becoming by which something comes to be through the arrival of form to matter, another origin of things must be pre-understood, according to which esse is conferred upon the whole universe of things by the first being (a primo ente), which is its own esse.390

Now, right here we have Thomas’s fundamental way of distinguishing the divine nature from that of everything else, corporeal or spiritual. As mentioned in the first chapter, some of his contemporaries held that all created substances are composed of matter and form, and that God alone is simple, being a pure form. Thomas holds that an angel too is a pure form itself, ipsa forma subsistens.391 But the angel is still composite. This is because the essence of his form, which is his essence, is not identical with his esse; rather, his essence is only that in and through which he receives and holds on to his esse. He only shares in his esse, in a manner analogous (not identical) to the ways in which matter shares in form and a subject shares in an accident. God’s esse, by contrast, is not really distinct from His essence, or from God Himself. And so He alone is absolutely simple.

Thomas’s so-called real distinction, in creatures, between essence and esse, has been debated for centuries. Recently, both it and his characterization of God as a subsistent esse itself, ipsum esse subsistens, have been criticized for being too much of a concession to Platonism and inconsistent with his own Aristotelian principles. I have discussed this issue at some length in other places.392 In what follows I am not going to try to resolve any of the debates, or to give a full presentation of Thomas’s thought in these areas.393 In the subsequent sections of this chapter I will say a few things about the Platonism issue in relation to Thomas’s conception of God. As for the real distinction, there is just one point about it that I would like to make. This is how very fine the distinction is, as Thomas conceives it. This does have some bearing on the question of the Aristotelian credentials for the distinction, because it can seem that Aristotle’s doctrine of substance has no room for a substantial act that is really distinct from substantial form. As we have seen repeatedly, Aristotelian form itself is act and makes what has it be in act. I would like to suggest that this is a problem only if we exaggerate the distinction in a way that Thomas does not mean to do.

The point then is this. The distinction that Thomas means to draw is primarily between a substance, or the essence of a substance, and what we have called the substance’s unqualified esse, which is its substantial esse. This is the esse that it has through its substantial form. It is quite close to the form. Indeed, the word unqualified may be somewhat misleading. It is not at all meant to suggest that this esse does not admit any complement or specification. Quite the contrary. The substantial esse of man, which is distinct from man and from the essence of man, is esse hominem; that is, it is the act of being a man.394 The esse of a horse is its act of being a horse. Generally, that of a living thing is its life. Calling it unqualified means merely that it is the esse according to which the substance simply is or exists, period. It is the substance’s first esse. Without it, the substance simply is not. It is opposed to any esse or any act according to which the substance is in act in some additional, non-substantial way: an act of being hot, of being virtuous, etc. Without these, the substance can still be. But even in the case of these acts, there is a distinction between the form and the esse that the form gives. An example of Thomas’s is the distinction between knowledge and being knowledgeable.395

So clearly the distinction is rather fine. It is not between a thing’s essence or form and some extraneous, unspecified, and (as it were) amorphous nature that is called simply esse and nothing else. Rather, the esse of diverse things is itself diverse in each of them. That is, diverse thing are diverse according to their esse. This means that what their esse itself is is diverse.396 Why? Because in each case it is a direct function of a diverse form or essence. But it is not the form or the essence. It is the act of an essence.397

This, however, does not mean that it is another act, added to that act which is the thing’s form. There are two distinct items that are called act here, but there are not two acts. Rather, esse is called act just by reason of itself. Form is called act by reason of its immediate connection with esse—its functioning, in virtue of itself, as that through which a thing has esse.398 Form is essentially act, but esse is, as it were, the very actness—actualitas, as Thomas often calls it—of any act.

If a form cannot quite be identified with the esse that it brings, the reason is that it also carries a dimension of potency. The esse is act and nothing but act. One way of seeing the potency of the substantial form, I think, is to consider how it disposes the substance for further acts, beyond the substantial esse—the acts that the substance needs in order to be fully perfect or complete.399 I am not now talking about the form’s role as an active principle of those further acts, but about its role as a sort of receptive principle of them. The soul is such a principle, and even angelic forms are: their powers of intellect and will, and the activities of these powers, are received in the angel’s substance, which is pure form.400 But this means that the form cannot be the substantial esse itself. For a receptive principle, as such, relates to what it can receive as potency to act. What is nothing but act, esse, cannot be receptive of act. And so the substantial form, having a dimension of potentiality, cannot be identical even with the substantial esse; it must be a receptive principle with respect to substantial esse itself.

In this respect, as having potentiality, substantial form is somewhat comparable to matter.401 And indeed, just as matter contracts form to a determinate individual, a substantial form that is not its esse contracts the esse to a determinate nature, a finite grade.402 However, a form’s relation to esse also differs from matter’s relation to form. The form is totally determined to the esse that is received through it, and this esse is inseparable from it, following on it immediately and in virtue of itself. Matter’s potency for form, and form’s potency for esse, are very different senses of the term potency.

In the case of God, the form does not contains any potency at all, nor is it a receptive principle, nor does it contract the act of being in any way. A sign of this is that God can have no accidents or additional perfections or acts of any sort.403 The deity is the only subsistent entity that is identical with its own esse. But I have stressed the fineness of the distinction between form and esse in creatures, partly because I think it is sometimes not fully appreciated, and partly because I think it sheds light on what the identity, or the absence of the distinction, in the case of God, amounts to. To repeat, the distinction in the creature is not merely between, e.g., man, or man’s form, and esse taken without specification; it is between man, or man’s form, and esse hominem, being man. And in the case of God, the identity is between God, or God’s form, and esse deum, the act of being God. It is between God and His own esse.404 In God’s case, too, the word esse admits a complement or a specification, in accordance with God’s form. And I shall want to argue we are not to understand God, or God’s form, to be identical with the nature of esse itself, taken universally or without specification.

This way of stating Thomas’s view, however, takes it for granted that he thinks there is such a thing as God’s form. There are reasons for doubting this assumption. In my opinion, the question goes to the heart of Thomas’s metaphysical teaching about God.

That Godhead Exists

One reason for doubting whether Thomas thinks that God has a form is that, if he does, then this form, and God Himself, would seem to be nothing other than the Platonic Idea of esse, Being Itself. This is inconsistent with very fundamental positions of Aristotle, who insists that being cannot be the essence of anything at all, and who in any case considers it far too varied and diverse in things to be the essence of a single entity. Thomas expresses agreement with these views. Seeing God’s essence as nothing other than esse itself also seems hard to square with the divine transcendence. If everything participates in esse and has esse in it, then must not everything have the divine nature in it, albeit in reduced mode? The divine nature will not be strictly proper to God. And we will have grasped or conceived it, inasmuch as we do have a concept of esse.

Or do we? Some interpreters have held that, for Thomas, there is no such concept, no such thing as what being is, and that in denying the distinction between essence or form and esse in God, Thomas is not so much saying that esse is God’s essence or form as he is denying that there is any such thing as God’s essence or form. We do not know what esse is because there is no such thing as what esse is, and likewise we do not know what God is because there is no such thing. And the fact that all things participate in esse does not mean that everything has the divine nature in it, again because there is no such thing as the divine nature, and because esse cannot be identified with God except when it is found separately, subsisting by itself, positively detached from any essence or nature or form.

Luckily I do not need to go into the question whether, for Thomas, there is any such thing as a concept of esse or what esse is. The question has been handled thoroughly in a recent doctoral thesis.405 The thesis, which is excellent, leaves no doubt: yes, there is such a thing. And there is also such a thing as what esse is. Although not very often, Thomas does occasionally speak of the nature or even the essence of esse, both in early and in very mature works.406

It is probably significant, though, that he does not do so very often.407 I suppose that this has to do with the fact that, as we saw, esse is something diverse in diverse things. Taken universally or without specification, it is one essence only in a very weak and qualified way. It is not one in species or even in genus, but only as a common proportion.408 It is common to all things in the way that act and potency are. That common proportion would be what the general concept expresses. So it is more the actuality of this or that essence than an essence in its own right. This weak unity of esse, however, would pose a problem for Thomas only if he did identify esse, taken without specification, with the essence of God. For if there is such a thing as the essence of God, it must surely have a stronger unity, indeed immeasurably stronger, than that of a mere proportion.

But is there after all such a thing as God’s essence, for Thomas, or not? Now, he does on several occasions say that God is esse tantum, “only esse.” In one of them, the youthful De ente et essentia, he also remarks that “some philosophers are found saying that God does not have a quiddity or an essence, because His essence is not other than His esse.”409 As Étienne Gilson perceived, Thomas evidently hesitated to embrace such “uncompromising language.” After all, to say that God has no essence sounds like saying that there is no such thing as what God is; and this sounds like saying that what God is is nothing—i.e., that there is no God. But Gilson did think that Thomas saw a point to such language. “To say that God has no essence really means that God is as a beyond-essence. This is best expressed by saying that God is the being whose essence is to be beyond essence or, in other words, God is the being whose essence it is to be.”410 Similar readings have been proposed quite recently. These mesh with a broader recent tendency to read Thomas’s theology as highly apophatic, that is, as holding that there is little or nothing that can be affirmed about God, and that ultimately even such judgments as that God is a subsistent esse are rather negative than affirmative.411

Now, as a matter of fact, in his commentary on the Sentences—nearly contemporaneous with the De ente et essentia—Thomas attributes the view that God has no essence to two thinkers, Avicenna and Maimonides.412 He then explains that their theology was quite apophatic, denying that any term taken from creatures could be attributed to God in a proper (non-metaphorical), absolute (not merely relative), and positive sense.413 As said of God, terms such as wisdom, goodness, essence, etc., either mean merely that He causes these features in creatures, or else serve merely to negate their opposites (foolishness, badness, privation) in Him. Further on in this passage, however, Thomas says that their reason for this view was simply that they wanted to deny that what such terms apply to, when they are said of creatures, could be attributed to God. Thus, regarding essence, they wanted to deny that it could be said of God in the sense in which it applies to “a certain thing that does not subsist.” But they do not mean to say that God lacks any “mode of perfection.”414 And still in this same passage, Thomas describes with approval the theology that does attribute such terms positively to God. He says that what these terms signify truly is in God, although it is so in a way that exceeds our conception.415

Moreover, in the De ente et essentia itself, Thomas says generally of simple or immaterial substances—angels and God—that essence is in them “in a truer and nobler way, inasmuch as they also have esse in a nobler way.”416 This is hardly going in the direction of denying essence of such substances. Nor is it easy to square with the notion that God’s essence is to be beyond essence because His essence is to be.417

Later in the De ente, Thomas says that “although God is only esse, He need not lack the other perfections and excellences (nobilitates), indeed he has all the perfections in all genera.”418 It seems to me that Thomas is definitely seeing essence itself as signifying a perfection. It is one that extends to all things, and one that approaches closer and closer to the perfection of esse itself as we ascend on the scale of the perfection of esse itself. The young Thomas did nod to the view that God has no essence, but that was hardly even a flirtation with it. And the very fact of his being aware of it only strengthens the significance of his repeatedly asserting the contrary.

Now, among creatures, more perfect are those essences that are without matter, subsisting forms. Indeed, there is a definite kinship between the notions of perfection and form, so much so that in the Summa theologiae, Thomas treats the likeness of creatures to God within the quaestio on God’s perfection, and he says there that likeness is a function of agreement or communion in form.419 And this is what I would especially like to stress: that Thomas ascribes form to God.420

The texts are far too many and too strongly worded to be swept under the rug. Here are a few from the Prima pars. God is “by His essence form” (q. 3, a. 2). “That sort of form which is not receivable in matter, but is self-subsistent, is individuated by the very fact that it cannot be received in anything else; and God is such a form” (q. 3, a. 2, ad 3). God is most appropriately called “He who is” because His esse is His essence and “each thing is denominated by its form” (q. 13, a. 11). God “is a simple form to the highest degree” (q. 13, a. 12, obj. 2). “God is called infinite as a form that is not terminated by any matter” (q. 86, a. 2, ad 1). And the Prima pars alone has over a hundred instances of the word deitas, Godhead. This signifies a form.

The higher substances lack the composition of form and matter. They are only forms, without matter. But although the very highest being lacks the composition (which implies the distinction) of esse and essence or of esse and form, and indeed is only esse, this does not at all mean that He is without essence or form. (Nor, as I shall argue in the next section, does it mean that when we think of His essence or His form we should think of nothing but esse.) There is no such thing as a form that is identical with its own matter, but there can be esse that is identical with its own form. This is because esse itself is “most formal.”421 Matter cannot be form because matter is potency and form is act. The very notions are opposed. But a form can be an esse, for that very same reason: form is act. What would be the difference between thinking of God as existing without form, and thinking of matter in that way—which, Thomas said, involves a contradiction?422 To be sure, some form has an aspect of potency, and that form cannot be an esse. But the mere notions are not opposed. And if a form that is an esse is more perfect than a form that is not, an esse that is a form is also more perfect than one that is not. It is more self-sufficient. Form is a thing’s power, or energy, to be. In God’s case, it is identical with the to be.

So we need to see God’s esse as containing in itself the perfection of form: the energy, the virtus, of being and of acting, that this word conveys. We already saw Thomas defending the idea of something that is its own form. He was speaking of the Persons of the Trinity and their being “of one essence,” an expression that signifies essence in the function of form. Connected with this notion is the equality of the Persons. Equality, Thomas says, pertains to quantity. Of course, in this context, it cannot be quantity of extension. It is rather quantity of virtus, according to the perfection of some form or nature. Its root, he says, is the perfection of the form or nature itself; then it can be considered in the effects of form, the first of which is esse, and the second, activity. Things with more perfect forms are more enduring in being and more potent in action. What is striking is that he says all this, and quite matter-of-factly, in a discussion of the Trinity.423

Clearly we also need the notion of form in the doctrine of God’s knowability and God’s knowledge. Thomas’s whole account of knowledge is in terms of form. In fact, Thomas associates God’s knowledge in a special way with the very word deus. That word signifies what has the divine nature, not as it is in itself—we cannot know or name it in that way—but as that which underlies His universal providence over things.424 Providence is an exercise of intellect (and of will).425 Here of course the fifth way is particularly relevant.

But it is perhaps with respect to God’s own knowability that the extreme versions of apophatic theology are hardest to square with Thomas’s teaching. If they do not leave us thinking that there is no such thing as what God is, and therefore no such thing as God, they at least make us wonder whether His unknowability is only in relation to us, or whether He is unknowable, period—even to Himself. On the previous page I quote a text from the Prima pars saying that God is infinite as a form that is not terminated by any matter. Thomas’s point there is that, in Himself, God is quite knowable. And He is quite knowing, for the same reason. As we saw, this same notion of form not contracted by matter is what Thomas uses to establish God’s being at the summit of cognition.426

In reality His knowledge and His knowability are the some thing. What He primarily knows, and that through which He knows everything else, is Himself. His intellect is identical with His intelligible likeness or species.427 This is the form that specifies His intellectual operation, and it is nothing other than His essence, which is that by which the divine understanding, “or rather, God Himself,” is specified.428

So there is even such a thing as God’s species, the kind of thing that God is. Obviously He is one of a kind. And obviously His is not a species of some genus. He cannot be defined in genus and difference. Even that would be a sort of composition in Him, and it would mean that He is limited, confined to that genus, so that He would not be principle of all esse.429 But knowability is not the same as definability; to define a thing is to express it in terms of other things, but it is possible to know a thing through itself. And having a form does not entail being limited, though it does entail being this and not that.430 The forms that limit esse and contract it to a species of a genus are forms that are distinct from esse and contain potency—imperfect forms, forms that are not act alone.

There are such things as what esse is, and what God is, and God’s species and form; and God’s form is God’s esse, which is subsistent esse, and is cause of everything that in any way shares in esse. One can see why some have found it hard to avoid concluding that Thomas’s God is the Platonic Idea of being or of esse. That is, God’s essence and the essence of esse or of being would be the very same. In the next section I shall try to show why this is not the case. To conclude this one, let me simply say something about Thomas’s language.

He does indeed say, in many places, that God, or God’s essence, is ipsum esse subsistens. In quite a few of these, he adds the word suum: God is “His esse itself, subsisting.” Now, this expression, by itself, in no way warrants identifying God’s esse with esse taken universally or without specification, or identifying His essence with the sheer essence of esse. But what about the cases in which Thomas does not add suum? Then it does sound as though he is saying that God is esse itself, subsisting. And that is how it is often rendered. But it does not have to be rendered that way. Notice, for instance, that Thomas speaks in several places of God or angel as ipsa forma subsistens. No one takes this to mean that God or angel is simply form itself, subsisting—that is, the universal nature of form existing by itself. Rather, in this case, the expression is translated with the indefinite article. An angel is a form itself, subsisting. Why should we not render ipsum esse subsistens in the same way? God is an act of being itself, subsisting. As it turns out, He is the only one. There cannot be many. But that does not amount to an identification of His esse, or of Him or His nature, with the common nature of esse. What I now wish to show is that, for Thomas, they cannot be identified, because His nature stands above the common nature of esse, as its very cause.

That God, and Godhead, and God’s Being are Beyond Being Itself

First let me present just a couple of texts in which Thomas sets God above common being, as its cause. One of the texts relates being to God’s will; the other relates it to his intellect. Afterwards I shall try to lay out how he reaches a conception of God’s nature, and even of God’s very being, as beyond the nature of being itself, not to be identified with it.431

The text regarding God’s will is from the De interpretatione commentary, within a discussion of determinism. Thomas is arguing that the infallible efficacy of God’s will, which extends to everything, does not make everything necessary. “For the divine will must be understood as standing outside the whole order of beings, in the manner of a cause pouring forth the whole of being (totum ens) and all its differences.”432

The other text, regarding God’s intellect, is from the commentary on the De divinis nominibus. Thomas is explaining how God is prior to every limit and boundary.

And He is the cause of the limiting of all, and not only of the things that are, but of esse itself. For created esse itself is not limited, if it is compared to creatures, because it extends to all; yet if it is compared to uncreated esse, it is found deficient and out of the forethought of the divine mind, having the boundary of its own conception (ratio).433

This is quite striking. Clearly esse does have a concept, a ratio. And this sets a sort of boundary, one that God has, so to speak, excogitated. Every creature, of course, shares in esse only in a limited fashion. But even if we prescind from anything that puts a limit on created esse, anything extraneous to esse itself, so that what remains is unlimited or infinite with respect to esse, nevertheless it is still something limited: it still falls within the boundary of the concept of esse. Thomas says that this is deficient in comparison with uncreated esse. Evidently uncreated esse does not fall within the boundary of the concept of esse. It is certainly an infinite esse, but it also goes beyond that.

We can speak, truly and properly, of God’s esse, but we must not think of it as falling under the common notion of esse. Or to put it another way, we may speak of God as something real, but we must not think of Him as part of reality. He does not stand within the hierarchy of lesser and greater strength of being, even as the greatest within it. We must think of Him as the source of the whole hierarchy and beyond the greatest within it. How can we form any notion of this?

Let me go back to the Summa for a moment. After presenting the five ways, Thomas takes up the question of God’s mode of being. He says that since we cannot know what God is (quid sit), neither can we know how He is (quomodo sit). This, however, does not mean that we cannot know anything positive about Him, but that we cannot know His proper mode of being, which is (so to speak) a function of what He properly is. But we can know how He is not, removing or negating features that do not suit Him. Indeed we can know that certain negations are proper to Him, true of nothing else.

The first such thing that Thomas seeks to remove is composition.434 God, and only God, is absolutely simple, free of composition, in every way. There is no composition of bodily parts, of matter and form, of individuating principle and essence, of essence and esse, of genus and difference, or of subject and accident; nor is He composed with anything else.

Then, immediately after considering God’s simplicity, Thomas treats His perfection.435 This is certainly a positive item. However, we cannot know the perfection that is proper to God, His distinctive mode of being perfect. Nevertheless, we can know that there is no perfection which He lacks. Again, this is proper to God.

Now, the reason given by Thomas for treating God’s perfection after His simplicity is that “in bodily things, the simple ones are imperfect and parts.”436 He is considering that we are apt to judge everything on the model of bodily things, which are our mind’s starting-points. Your computer is more complex than its screen. And you are more complex than your computer. From our point of view, simplicity and perfection are rather in tension with one another. Thomas is pressing and exploiting this tension. Having taken us to the extreme of simplicity, he now takes us to the extreme of perfection. And he wants us to understand that these extremes are one and the same thing. He thinks we can come to see that they must be. But the very tension makes it abundantly clear that we cannot see how. That is, we cannot see the form according to which they are one. Right here, it seems to me, Thomas is giving his fundamental account of God’s transcendence, showing by rigorous reasoning that He lies beyond anything reason can conceive. It is not the extreme simplicity alone, nor the extreme perfection alone, that establishes this, but the two together.

Let me spell this out briefly, using mainly the second article from the question on God’s perfection. In the first article, it is determined that God is indeed perfect. He is the first active principle, and so He must be in act to the highest degree; and something is perfect insofar as it is in act. This is confirmed by the fact that His essence is (an) esse itself; for esse is the actuality of all things, and even of the forms themselves. If anything can be added to an esse, it is only in the manner of what receives it, in material fashion; esse itself is formal and received. Of course, nothing can be added to God, even as a recipient.

Then in the second article, Thomas determines that the perfections of all things are in God. He gives two arguments. One is that God is the first efficient cause of all things, and that the perfection of an effect must pre-exist in its efficient cause, either in an equal way, if cause and effect are of the same kind, or in a more eminent way, if they differ in kind; and hence all the excellences of things pre-exist in God in a more eminent way. The other argument, which is what chiefly interests us, rests precisely on the fact that God is (a) self-subsistent esse itself.437 The first thing that follows from this is that He contains in himself “the whole perfection of esse.” To illustrate this, Thomas imagines a subsistent heat, a heat not received in and conditioned by any subject. Such a heat could not be lacking in any of the perfection—the virtus—of heat. In the same way, the subsistent esse of God cannot lack any of the perfection of esse. But this means that He must contain absolutely all the perfections in things. For all perfections “pertain to the perfection of esse.” Things are perfect just insofar as they have esse in some way.

Now, this last assertion may sound as though esse itself is the only real perfection. But this is not what Thomas means. He also recognizes other perfections, distinct from esse. This is clear in similar passages from other works.438 In the Summa contra gentiles, he gives the example of wisdom. The wisdom of Socrates is certainly not his substantial, unqualified esse. It is not even his act of being wise. But the wisdom of Socrates is still a perfection, precisely because through it, Socrates is wise. His wisdom is a form, according to which his act of being wise is constituted. It pertains to his being wise; it is a principle thereof. If the entire perfection of esse is in God, then all the various forms of things must also be in Him. Every perfection of esse is tied to the virtus—as it were, the energy—of some form.

Along this line, the article’s first two objections are particularly significant. The first is that the perfections of things are many and diverse, whereas God is simple. The second is that the species of things are perfected by their differences, and these are opposites; but opposites cannot exist in the same subject. Thomas answers the two objections together, very briefly. He does not at all deny that the perfections and differences in things are diverse and even opposed. He simply asserts that things diverse and opposed in themselves pre-exist in God as one, without detriment to His simplicity; and he cites pseudo-Dionysius, who likens God to the sun, which, being one, pre-contains all the substances and qualities of sensible things “uniformly.”439 Uniformly, of course, means in a single form.

The early, De ente version of the argument even speaks in terms of qualities: “just as, if someone, through one quality, could effect the actions of all qualities, then he would have all qualities in that one quality; so God has in His esse itself all perfections.”440

Now what, on this account, is the difference between the way in which the perfections of things are in the things themselves, and the way in which they are in God? It is not just a difference of strength or intensity—not even an infinite one. It is a difference in what the perfection is, a difference in its very nature. This is clear because, in the things themselves, the perfections differ in nature from each other; whereas in God, their nature is nothing other than the nature of God, which is absolutely simple.

In some cases this is extremely obvious. What the perfection of lion is, in a lion itself, is something that makes the lion be a lion. But as it is in God, the perfection of lion does not make Him be a lion. He is a lion only metaphorically. This is because in the proper sense, the name lion also implies imperfection or limitation and excludes many other perfections.441

But even in the case of perfections whose names do not of themselves imply imperfection or limitation or exclude some other perfection, what the perfection is, considered in itself, differs from what it is in God. For in itself, what it is differs from what other perfections are. But in God, what each perfection is does not differ from what any of the others is. What each one is, is God. It is not a component of God, distinct from the others; God does not have components. He is not the synthesis of all perfections. For he is not a synthesis at all. He is a maximally simple form.

In short: absolutely speaking, what wisdom is and what love is are not the same. But in God, what wisdom is and what love is are absolutely the same; they are what God is. Wisdom is not God. But God’s wisdom is God. And so, what wisdom is, and what God’s wisdom is, are not the same.

This is the core of Thomas’s doctrine of the non-univocity of all names said commonly of God and creatures.442 Each name signifies some perfection. It does so according to a concept that “circumscribes and comprehends” the perfection, i.e. that expresses just what it is, and that distinguishes it from the others that its subject has. And this is how each perfection really is in any creature: circumscribed and distinct from the others, according to what it is. But with God, while preserving the perfection that is circumscribed by the concept that the name signifies, we must remove the circumscription. The concept must include its own failure to express what the perfection is and include its not distinguishing what that perfection is from what those signified by other names are. This is not to make the various names that apply to God synonymous. The concepts that they signify still differ. But the nature of the thing conceived is the same, and each concept reflects this fact by its lacking circumscription and by its thereby leaving that nature unexpressed and transcending the concept’s own positive content.443

A name said commonly of God and creature is not univocal. It does not have the same meaning in the two cases. But neither is it wholly equivocal. The meanings are connected, according to a definite relation; we have just seen how. That is why we can draw conclusions about God’s perfections using our knowledge of those perfections as they are in creatures. In Thomas’s terminology, a name that is said of many things neither univocally nor wholly equivocally is said analogically. Analogy means proportion. A name said analogically primarily signifies one thing, and in a subordinate way it signifies one or more relations or proportions to that one thing. So we can ask: of the names said commonly of God and creatures, which is primary, what it signifies as said of God, or what it signifies as said of some creature?444

Here again we must distinguish what is primary for us and what is primary simply. What is primary for us—that to which we first apply such a name, being what we first know—is in a creature. And thus, in the definition of what the name means as said of God, we put what it means as said of the creature. Good, as said of God, means that in which what we call goodness in creatures pre-exists in a higher way (the way described above).445 But this very formulation also indicates that what is primary simply is what the name means as said of God. He is good most truly. What goodness is in creatures is an effect, and a more or less imperfect likeness, of what it is in God. It is relative, proportioned, to the goodness of God.

Now let us go back to the question of esse. What we said above about wisdom applies equally well to esse. Absolutely speaking, what esse is, and what essence or form or power or wisdom or love is, are not the same. But in God they are identical; each is just what God is. And so, what esse is, and what God’s esse is, are not the same. Esse is just esse. God himself, Thomas says, is esse tantum, just an esse; but Thomas is also saying that God’s esse is not just esse! In raising our thought to God, we must certainly strip matter from form, leaving form uncontracted. But we must not then strip all forms or other perfections away from esse, leaving esse unspecified. Nor do we strip common esse from His esse, making the word purely equivocal, or rather meaningless. Rather we consider the intrinsic kinship that all forms and perfections have with common esse, and we fold them all into it; and then we smooth out the folds, leaving something that is absolutely simple, and that is therefore outside the whole panorama of created perfections and outside common esse itself.446

Now although this is supremely knowable in itself, it does leave us in the dark.447 “The divine essence is something uncircumscribed, containing supereminently in itself whatever can be signified or understood by a created intellect; and this can in no way be represented by any created intelligible likeness, because every created form is determined according to some concept, whether of wisdom, or of power, or of esse itself, or such like.”448 This is not an esse without essence or without form. It is a form that is an esse, and a wisdom, and a power, and the perfection of a lion. But none of these terms expresses its essence. Its essence cannot be expressed in terms of anything but itself.

We name God with many names because none of them perfectly expresses Him as He is in Himself. This does not yield falsehood, so long as we include the failure in what the names mean. And we had better learn to do so, because as regards the names that signify our own conceptions of Him, the failure cannot be fully overcome. Ever.

But if our intellect saw God through Himself, it could impose one name on that conception, which will be in the Fatherland; and so it is said in Zechariah (14:9), On that day the Lord will be one, and His name one. But that one name would not signify goodness alone, or wisdom alone, or something of that sort, but it would include the significations of all these [names]. But nevertheless, if an intellect seeing God through His essence were to impose a name on the reality that it saw, and to name by way of a conception thereof that it has, it would still have to impose many names; for it is impossible that a conception of a created intellect represent the whole perfection of the divine essence. Whence, seeing one thing, it would form diverse conceptions, in the way that Chrysostom also says that the angels praise God, some as majesty, some as goodness, and so forth. But the conception that perfectly represents Him is the uncreated Word. And therefore it is just one.449

321. See, e.g., In Meta., II, lect. 1, §296.

322. STh, I, q. 5, a. 5, ad 3.

323. In Phys., II, lect. 4, §175[10].

324. In Meta., III, lect. 4, §384. Cf. In Phys., I, lect. 15, §140.

325. De ente, cap. 3; see De subst. sep., cap. 8.

326. See above, 90.

327. St. Augustine tells us that, as a Manichean, he was calling spirit and divine what was really nothing but ordinary sensible light, and that he did not realize his confusion until he read the writings of the Platonists: De beata vita, 1,4; Confessiones, 4,24; 4,31; 5,19–20; 7,1; 7,16.

328. STh, I, q. 75, a. 2.

329. See above, 39. Clearly it is in a somewhat qualified sense, since a substance cannot be composed of other unqualified substances, each with a distinct substantial being. See Metaph., VII.16, 1040b5–16.

330. See above, 75.

331. STh, I, q. 75, a. 2, ad 1 & ad 2.

332. Thomas Aquinas, Super I Epistolam B. Pauli ad Corinthios lectura, cap. 15, lect. 2.

333. STh, I, q. 75, a. 4, ad 2.

334. Notice that I do not say that the soul is one part of the person and that the other is the body. For Thomas, the human person is a body. Again, we must not confuse body with matter. The soul is one part of the person, matter the other. By informing the matter, the soul makes the human person be an actual being, and a body, and an organism, and an animal, and a human being (STh, I, q. 76, a. 6, ad 1). It makes the human person be a person, an individual substance of a rational nature.

335. STh, I, q. 76, a. 1, ad 5.

336. See STh, I, q. 76, a. 1, obj. 4 & ad 4.

337. STh, I, q. 76, a. 5, ad 3.

338. Thomas does think that the human soul begins to exist at the end of the process of human generation and not before (STh, I, q. 90, a. 4). Nevertheless it does not begin in the way other forms and souls do, as the effect of some physical agent’s action upon matter. A physical agent cannot produce a spiritual effect. It must be created by God (STh, I, q. 90, aa. 2 & 3). It is created then because it is by nature meant to inform a body.

339. On the development of Thomas’s thought on the soul’s immortality, see Dewan, Form and Being, 175–87.

340. STh, I, q. 75, a. 6. He gives a very similar argument for the incorruptibility of angels in STh, I, q. 50, a. 5.

341. For the use of the term logical in this connection, see In Meta., IX, lect. 1, §1775.

342. STh, I, q. 75, a. 6, ad 2; cf. I, q. 50, a. 5, ad 3.

343. For this notion, see STh, I, q. 50, a. 5, ad 3; cf. I, q. 2, a. 3, Tertia via.

344. See De pot., q. 5, a. 3, ad 12; Scg, II, cap. 30.

345. See In II Phys., lect. 15, §270; Scg, II, cap. 28, §1061; STh, I, q. 82, a. 1; In Meta., V, lect. 6, §833–5; In De caelo, I, lect. 25, §248[3].

346. STh, I, q. 89, a. 1.

347. STh, I, q. 76, a. 1, ad 6.

348. STh, Supplementum, q. 79, a. 2, ad 1.

349. STh, Supplementum, q. 79, a. 1.

350. STh, Supplementum, q. 79, a. 2, ad 1. More generally on the resurrection, see Scg, IV, cap. 81-89.

351. STh, Supplementum, q. 75, a. 3.

352. Ibid.

353. STh, I, q. 39, a. 2, ad 5.

354. See Metaph., VIII.6, 1045a36–b7; STh, I, q. 75, a. 5, ad 3.

355. See above, 76; and below, 135.

356. See, e.g., In Meta., Proem.

357. See STh, I, q. 44, especially a. 4, ad 4.

358. See STh, I, q. 45, a. 5, esp. ad 1. Even the angels only participate in esse and in the good; see In De caelo, II, lect. 18, §463[6].

359. STh, I, q. 65, a. 3.

360. I discuss this in “The Causality of the Unmoved Mover.”

361. See STh, I, q. 57, aa. 1 & 2 (and cf. I, q. 55, a. 3, esp. ad 3); In De Caelo, II, lect. 13, §417[7]–418[8]. On how our intellect knows material individuals, see STh, I, q. 86, a. 1.

362. STh, I, q. 25, a. 3.

363. STh, I. q, 50, a. 1; De spir. creat., q. un., a. 5.

364. Doolan, “Aquinas on the Demonstrability of Angels.”

365. This is the whole drift of STh, I, q. 50, a. 1. Notice too that, in this respect, there is a sense in which angels might be said to play an even more important or more distinctive role in metaphysics than in theology. In theology, Thomas says, angels are considered for the same reason that any other creature is, namely, to manifest God (who is theology’s subject); but in metaphysics, they are considered for the same reason that God is, namely to account for being (which is metaphysics’ subject) as principles of it, albeit merely secondary ones, e.g., through the movement of the celestial spheres: In De Trin., q. 5, a. 4, ad 3.

366. In Meta., VII, lect. 11, §1526.

367. Scg, III, cap. 38, §2161; STh, II–II, q. 85, a. 1.

368. Scg, III, cap. 38, §2163.

369. He also finds Christian doctrine confirming the possibility of philosophical knowledge of God, most conspicuously in St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans, 1:20; see Scg, I, cap. 12, §77; STh, I, q. 13, a. 5. This is what has subsequently come to be called natural theology (with “natural” referring to natural reason). At present the idea of natural theology is not much in fashion, even (especially?) among Christian theologians. Luckily the issue falls outside the scope of this book. But for a spirited defense of the possibility of natural theology, and of Christian faith’s own need of that possibility, see Turner, Faith, Reason and the Existence of God.

370. De ver., q. 14, a. 10.

371. STh, I, q. 13, a. 8 ad 2; cf. STh, I, q. 12, a. 12. Here we have, in effect, the famous threefold approach to God of pseudo-Dionysius: causality, negation or removal, and eminence. See Twetten, “Aquinas’s Aristotelian and Dionysian Definition of ‘God’.”

372. STh, I, q. 13, a. 10.

373. STh, I, q. 11, a. 3.

374. STh, I, q. 13, aa. 8 & 9.

375. See STh, I–II, q. 2, a. 5, obj. 3. I will not even try to give a full treatment of any of the ways here. For a thorough presentation, see Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 442–500. For an interesting recent commentary on them, see Weingartner, God’s Existence. Can it be Proven?

376. Helpful on the third way are Dewan, “The Distinctiveness of St. Thomas’ ‘Third Way’” and “The Interpretation of St. Thomas’s Third Way,” and also Grieco, “An Analysis of St. Thomas Aquinas’s ‘Third Way’.”

377. Physics, II.8, 198b10–199b33.

378. In Phys., II, lect. 11–14.

379. See In Phys., II, lect. 11, §249[9]; lect. 12, §254[5]; lect. 13, §259[5]. Cf. STh, I–II, q. 94, a. 2: all substances tend toward the conservation of their being according to their nature.

380. The point is made explicitly in the reply to the second objection of STh, I, q. 2, a. 3. The objector says that everything happening in the world can be traced back either to nature or to the human will. The reply is that this is true, but that both nature (which acts unknowingly for an end) and the human will (which is mobile and contingent) must in turn be traced back further, to a divine cause.

381. In Phys., II, lect. 14, §268[8]. On the relation between nature and creation in Thomas, see Aertsen, Nature and Creature.

382. See Dewan, “St. Thomas, the Fourth Way, and Creation.”

383. The point is related to the thesis that no creature can be an instrument of creation; see STh, I, q. 45, a. 5, ad 1.

384. Not many pages later, Thomas indicates why reaching God as cause of the being of all things allows him to go on at once to consider God the cause of absolutely all the perfections of things: “all perfections pertain to the perfection of being, for things are perfect inasmuch as they have being in some way” (STh, I, q. 4, a. 2). On this text, see below, 139–41.

385. See Thomas Aquinas, In Symbolum Apostolorum, a. 1.

386. STh, I, q. 45, a. 2.

387. STh, I, q. 46, a. 2.

388. See STh, I, q. 45, aa. 2 & 3.

389. Thomas also mentions the agreement in two similar earlier passages: De pot., q. 3, a. 5, and STh, I, q. 44, a. 1.

390. De subst. sep., cap. 9. The reference is to the previous chapter, where he argued that there cannot be but one subsistent esse, “just as any form, if it be considered separate, must be one.”

391. STh, I, q. 50, a. 2, ad 3; q. 50, a. 5.

392. The most forceful and philosophically interesting formulations of the criticisms that I have seen are those offered, in a number of writings, by the eminent Italian philosopher and Aristotelian scholar, Enrico Berti. Two of the earliest are “Il problema della sostanzialità dell’essere e dell’uno nella Metafisica di Aristotele” and “Aristotelismo e neoplatonismo nella dottrina tomistica di Dio come «ipsum esse»,” both of which are included in Berti, Studi Aristotelici, 221–52 and 423–29. For more bibliography, and an attempt to address the issues, see my “On Whether Aquinas’s Ipsum Esse is ‘Platonism’.” Also pertinent is my “Harmonizing Plato and Aristotle on Esse: Thomas Aquinas and the De hebdomadibus.”

393. On the real distinction, a thorough overview of Thomas is offered in Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 132–76.

394. See De ver., q. 2, a. 11.

395. Ibid.

396. Ibid.; also De ente, cap. 4; STh, I, q. 3, a. 5.

397. De pot., q. 5, a. 4, ad 3. Cf. In Sent., 1, d. 4, q. 1, a. 1, ad 2; d. 19, q. 5, a. 1, obj. 1; d. 33, q. 1, a. 1, ad 1; d. 37, q. 1, a. 2; De ver., q. 10, a. 1, obj. 3; De pot., q. 9, a. 5, ad 19; De spir. creat., q. un., a. 11; STh, I, q. 54, a. 1; In Meta., IV, lect. 2, §558; In Peryerm., 1, lect. 5, §73.

398. “Each thing is a being in act through a form, either according to substantial being or according to accidental being, whence every form is act”: De spir. creat., q. un., a. 3, c. (emphasis added).

399. I develop this line of thought in “How Many Acts of Being Can a Substance Have?”

400. See STh, I, q. 54, a. 3, ad 2; q. 77, a. 1, ad 6.

401. See STh, I, q. 90, a. 2, ad 1.

402. STh, I, q. 7, a. 2; q. 50, a. 2, ad 1 & ad 4; q. 54, a. 2.

403. STh, I, q. 3, a. 6.

404. See De ver., q. 2, a. 11.

405. Vargas Della Casa, “Thomas Aquinas on the Apprehension of Being.”

406. In the (probably) early Expositio libri Boetii De ebdomadibus, lect. 2, §25, Thomas quotes Boethius: “esse itself has nothing else mixed in,” and to this Thomas adds, “outside its essence.” A similar thought is found in Scg, I, cap. 23, §214. In Quodl., III, q. 1, a. 1, he says “the nature of esse belongs to God infinitely.” He also says that God knows the “nature of esse”: De ver., q. 2, a. 15, ad 3; Scg, I, cap. 50, §1; STh, I, q. 14, a. 6.

407. And in one place he shows some reservation about it, saying “. . . so to speak, the nature of esse” (. . . ut ita dixerim, naturam essendi): STh, I, q. 45, a. 5, ad 1.

408. See I, q. 4, a. 3.

409. De ente, cap. 4 (very near the beginning). On the meaning of the term quiddity, see above, 60n29.

410. Gilson, The Elements of Christian Philosophy, 145–46.

411. For example, Porro, Tommaso d’Aquino, 245 ff., 258, 408; Marion, God Without Being, 229–236. There are many eminent readers of Thomas, however, who do not make him out to be so apophatic: e.g., Davies, Dewan, Elders, Kretzmann, Stump, te Velde, and Wippel.

412. On the Neoplatonic background to the Avicennian doctrine of God as being alone, beyond essence and form, and also on this doctrine in the Liber de causis, see Taylor, “Aquinas, The Plotiniana Arabica, and the Metaphysics of Being and Actuality.”

413. Relative terms include those that indicate causality. A relative term does not immediately express much, if anything, about the intrinsic constitution of that to which it is attributed.

414. In Sent., I, d. 2, q. 1, a. 3.

415. In fact, since everything in God is God, and God is His own essence, the knowledge that these terms express must be some sort of knowledge of God’s essence. Thomas certainly denies that any of our knowledge of God is “quidditative.” That is, none of it provides even a partial answer to the question, “What is God?” But this is not to say that we have no knowledge about what God is. Indeed, Thomas insists that it is impossible to know that a thing exists without knowing something about what it is, at least in some imperfect and confused way. In the case of God, he explains, this consists precisely in the threefold way of negation, causality, and eminence; see In De Trin., q. 6, a. 3.

416. De ente, cap. 1.

417. On a valid sense in which God or God’s essence could be said to be beyond essence, see below, 141n123.

418. De ente, cap. 4.

419. STh, I, q. 4, a. 3.

420. Gilson does not deny this, but he certainly downplays it, often couching it in hypothetical terms (“Let us suppose God is pure form . . .”), and presenting it as a mere phase in Thomas’s account of God, from which we “jump” into the true Thomistic world of God as esse; see Gilson, The Elements of Christian Philosophy, 126–28.

421. STh, I, q. 7, a. 1; Scg, I, cap. 23, §214.

422. See above, 42–43, 49n74.

423. STh, I, q. 42, a. 1, ad 1.

424. STh, I, q. 13, a. 8. Notice that, as to what the word signifies, “God” is a more suitable name for God than “He who is” (STh, I, q. 13, a. 11, ad 1).

425. STh, I, q, 22, Proem.

426. STh, I, q. 14, a. 1; as we also saw, the article sends us back to I, q. 7, a. 1, on God’s infinity.

427. STh, I, q. 14, a. 2.

428. STh, I, q. 14, a. 5, ad 3. When He is seen by a creature, His essence itself (not a likeness of it) becomes the created intellect’s intelligible form: STh, I, q. 12, a. 5.

429. See STh, I, q. 3, a. 5.

430. See STh, I, q. 7, a. 1, obj. 3 & ad 3.

431. On this see Dewan, “St. Thomas and Creation: Does God Create ‘Reality’?”

432. In Peryerm., I, lect. 14, §197[22]. He goes on to explain that necessity and contingency are differences of being. God’s will infallibly makes necessary things happen necessarily, and contingent things happen contingently. His will itself, unlike any other will or cause, “transcends the order of necessity and contingency.” See Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God.

433. Super Librum Dionysii De divinis nominibus, cap. XIII, lect. 3, §989.

434. STh, I, q. 3.

435. STh, I, q. 4.

436. STh, I, q. 3, Proem.

437. I think the insertion of “a” here is quite justified, given that an earlier version of the same argument rests on God’s being His own esse: Scg, I, cap. 28, §259–61.

438. E.g., De ente, cap. 5 (Leonine edition vol. 43, 378, ll. 30–43); De pot., q. 6, a. 6; Scg, I, cap. 28, §260.

439. Cf. STh, I, q. 14, a. 6, explaining how God knows the proper natures of all things, just by knowing His own essence perfectly.

440. De ente, cap. 4.

441. STh, I, q, 13, a. 3.

442. STh, I, q. 13, a. 5.

443. This doctrine is extremely important with regard to the Trinity. See, e.g., STh, I, q. 28, a. 2, ad 2: in a divine person, the divine essence that is common to the persons is not really distinct from the relation that constitutes and distinguishes that person. It is in this sense that we might speak of God’s essence as “beyond essence.” The simple reality of the divine essence contains more (not less!) than what is signified by the word essence. The signification of essence, as ascribed to a complete subsistent thing, extends only to what belongs to the thing considered absolutely or just in itself; what is relative to something else is signified in some other way. In creatures the absolute and the relative are really distinct; in God they are one simple reality that goes beyond either signification. And thus the divine relations are also “beyond relation.”

444. STh, I, q. 13, a. 6.

445. STh, I, q. 13, a. 2.

446. Analogous to this mystery of a being that is at once absolutely simple and in possession of all perfections is the mystery of God’s duration in being, which also is simple—without any real succession of temporal parts—and at the same time “includes” all the parts of time; its measure is not time but something beyond that called eternity. See STh, I, q. 10, aa. 1 & 2; q. 13, a. 1, ad 3; q. 14, a. 9.

447. Cf. In Sent., I, d. 8, q. 1, a. 1, ad 4.

448. STh, I, q. 12, a. 2; emphasis added.

449. In Sent., I, d. 2, q. 1, a. 3. I have not been able to trace the Chrysostom reference. The fundamental thought here, I believe, is the same as that of the passage that I have quoted in the previous paragraph, from STh, I, q. 12, a. 2: no created form can represent the divine essence as it is in itself. If a created intellect does know the divine essence as it is in itself, this is not through a created form representing the essence, but through the essence itself, united in its own being to the created intellect (STh, I, q. 12, a. 2, ad 3). But if the created intellect that thus knows the divine essence forms a conception expressing its knowledge, and names God according to that conception, even this name will fall short of His essence, because that conception too will be a mere created form.

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