4. God as Eternal and Simple (SCG 1,14–27)
God as Eternal and Simple (SCG 1,14–27)
SCG 1,14 OPENS with the words “We have shown that there exists a first being, whom we call God. We must, accordingly, now investigate the nature of this being.”1 Yet Aquinas immediately adds that we are unable to apprehend God by knowing what God is and are best advised to “especially make use of the method of remotion.”2 He means that we should especially aim to consider what God is not rather than what God is. As I have noted, Aquinas does not think that we can have scientia when it comes to God. He holds that reflection should lead us to see that God is not understandable in the way that things in the world are. In Aquinas’s view, we can understand what something is insofar as it is spatiotemporal and can be classified with respect to genus and species. Our ability to classify things in this way is, thinks Aquinas, confined to material things, while God is not material. Aquinas, however, does not conclude that we can make no progress at all when it comes to an account of God’s nature. Hence his allusion to “the method of remotion,” which, in SCG 1,14, he first employs so as to claim that God is not moved. That God is not moved, he says, seems to have been established by SCG 1,13.