Chapter 10. Necessity in Creatures, the Eternity of the World, and Distinctions among Creatures (SCG 2,30–45)
CHAPTER 10. NECESSITY IN CREATURES, THE ETERNITY OF THE WORLD, AND DISTINCTIONS AMONG CREATURES (SCG 2,30–45)
1. ND, 2, 85 [1].
2. ND, 2, 85 [2]. For Aquinas, examples of necessary created beings are angels and human souls. For reasons I cannot go into here, Aquinas also takes heavenly bodies to be necessary created beings. For a detailed account of Aquinas on heavenly bodies, see Thomas Litt, Les Corps Célestes Dans L’Univers de Saint Thomas D’Aquin (Louvain: Publications Universitaires, 1963).
3. ND, 2, 86 [5].
4. For Aristotle, see Physics 1,9 and 8,1, De Caelo 1,3, and Metaphysics 12,6. In his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences, Aquinas argues that Aristotle did not really hold that the universe had no beginning. But he came to repudiate this reading of Aristotle, as seems clear from his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics.
5. See Summa Theologiae 1a,46 and De Potentia 3,17. Also note Aquinas’s De Aeternitate Mundi. Many of Aquinas’s contemporaries held that it can be proved that the world began to exist. Such, for example, was the position of St. Bonaventure (c. 1217–1274), who, like Aquinas, taught at the University of Paris. Another notable contemporary of Aquinas who thought that the world cannot be eternal was John Pecham (c. 1230–1292), a student of Bonaventure and archbishop of Canterbury from 1279 to 1292. Norman Kretzmann, whose knowledge of medieval authors was considerable, says that Aquinas seems to have been the only person during Aquinas’s lifetime to have contested the claim that it can be proved that the world began to be while also insisting, on the basis of faith, that it did begin to be. See note 14 on 148 of Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Creation: Aquinas’s Natural Theology in “Summa Contra Gentiles” II (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). A notable premedieval Christian arguing against Aristotle’s conclusion that the world has always existed was John Philoponus (c. 490–570). The work of his to note in this connection is De Aeternitate Mundi Contra Aristotelem. This comes down to us only in fragments, but for an English edition of it as a whole, see Philoponus, Against Aristotle on the Eternity of the World, translated by Christian Wilde (London: Duckworth, 1987).
6. ND, 2, 92 [4].
7. ND, 2, 98 [5].
8. ND, 2, 101 [3].
9. ND, 2, 101 [5].
10. ND, 2, 103 [3].
11. ND, 2, 103 [5].
12. ND, 2, 104 [6].
13. ND, 2, 105 [6].
14. ND, 2, 106 [8].
15. ND, 2, 110 [2].
16. ND, 2, 110 [3].
17. ND, 2, 110–111 [4].
18. ND, 2, 111 [6].
19. ND, 2, 111 [7].
20. As I noted above, Aquinas seems to have been unusual in his day in taking the position that he does on our ability to prove that the world cannot have always existed.
21. ND, 2, 112 [4].
22. ND, 2, 113 [10].
23. Aquinas thought that the sun revolves around the earth. So I have modified his example so that it might make sense to contemporary readers, all of whom I expect to think that the earth revolves around the sun.
24. ND, 2, 113 [12].
25. ND, 2, 113 [12].
26. ND, 2, 114 [13].
27. Something like this argument appears in paragraph 3 of ND, 2’s rendition of SCG 2,39.
28. ND, 2, 116–117 [6].
29. ND, 2, 119 [3].
30. ND, 2, 121 [4].
31. ND, 2, 121 [5].
32. Manicheism was founded by a Persian teacher called Mani (216–c. 275). It thrived between the third and seventh centuries. At one time, St. Augustine of Hippo was an adherent of Manicheism, and he wrote about it in his Confessions. Central to Manicheism was belief in an ongoing struggle between a power for good and a power for evil, each of them responsible for some things in the world. For more on Manicheism, see Andrew Welburn, Mani, the Angel and the Column of Glory: An Anthology of Manichean Texts (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1998).
33. ND, 2, 121 [5].
34. ND, 2, 122 [6].
35. ND, 2, 122 [7].
36. ND, 2, 122 [8].
37. ND, 2, 122 [9].
38. Here Aquinas seems to be thinking that evil always results accidentally from what something or someone aims at when seeking goodness of some kind. I might aim to save your life by pushing you out of the way of an oncoming car, only to find that I have inadvertently pushed you into the way of yet another oncoming car. Or I might aim to get rich by robbing a bank, only to find that I have inadvertently deprived my aged parents of the money they have invested in it. So Aquinas takes badness to be accidentally caused as good is aimed at by one or more agents and, therefore, sees no need to postulate several different agents when trying to account for the occurrence of goodness and badness in general. You might think that someone might aim at something bad directly and that badness is not, therefore, accidentally caused. Yet Aquinas thinks that aiming (whether on the part of people or other things) is always aiming at what seems (intellectually or by instinct or nature) good to what is aiming. Serial killers might revel in killing since it gives them a release or satisfaction of some sort. Yet serial killers are aiming at what seems to be good to them, something that, indeed, can be thought of as good (i.e., there is nothing intrinsically wrong with release or satisfaction). So even in this case Aquinas would say that evil results accidentally from a seeking of goodness of some kind.
39. ND, 2, 122 [10].
40. Aquinas seems to be thinking of Avicenna’s Metaphysics 9,4. He says that Avicenna says “that God, by knowing Himself, produces one first intelligence, wherein there already exists potentiality and act; that this intelligence, by knowing God, produces the second intelligence; by knowing itself as it is in act, produces the soul of the sphere; and by knowing itself as being in potentiality, produces the substance of the first sphere.” Aquinas goes on to say: “And thus, proceeding from this point, [Avicenna] teaches that the diversity of things is the effect of secondary causes” (ND, 2, 128 [11]). I am not here concerned with the accuracy of Aquinas’s reading of Avicenna. That is something on which scholars who know more than I do about Avicenna can advise us. For a solid and scholarly introduction to the thinking of Avicenna, see Jon McGinnis, Avicenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
41. ND, 2, 127 [8].
42. ND, 2, 127 [9].
43. Here Aquinas seems to be alluding to Origen’s Peri Archon (On First Principles) 2. Origen (182–254) was a Christian Neoplatonist and, arguably, the first Christian author to engage in theology and philosophy in a systematic way. He taught in Alexandria and Caesarea. Ideas associated with Origen came in for much criticism among later theologians.
44. ND, 2, 135–136 [15].
45. ND, 2, 138–139 [9].
46. For ancient authors, see Richard Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). For medieval authors, especially Aquinas, see Richard C. Dales, Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World (Leiden: Brill, 1991). Aquinas’s earliest discussion of the eternity of the world comes in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences, bk. 2, distinction 1, question 1. For a translation of this text, see Aquinas on Creation, edited by Steven E. Baldner and William E. Carroll (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1997). The volume edited by Baldner and Carroll also contains a translation of Aquinas’s De Aeternitate Mundi based on the 1976 Leonine edition of that text.
47. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that God created from “the beginning of time” (ab initio temporis) and thereby provided the first, formal, conciliar text asserting that the world had a beginning.
48. Richard Swinburne, Space and Time, 2nd ed. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1981), 258.
49. See Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe (New York: Knopf, 2014).
50. J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 93.
51. The Miracle of Theism, 93.
52. Sorabji, Time, Creation and the Continuum, 219.
53. It has been suggested that the start of the book of Genesis does not say that God created the material universe from nothing or that the universe had a beginning brought about by God. But it does seem to do just this. Genesis 1:1 says: “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” So, you might think that Genesis 1.1 is saying that, in creating, God acted on something. Yet, taken as a whole, Genesis does seem to teach that nothing other than God ever existed without God making it to be. Here I agree with Richard Sorabji when he says: “It makes no difference that it [Genesis, 1.1] (naturally) does not specify whether it is formless matter or the ordered universe, including its matter, that begins: in either case we should in effect have an absolute beginning to the material universe” (Time, Creation and the Continuum, 194).
54. ND, 2, 36, chapter 5 [1].