4.3 God as Noncomposite (SCG 1,18)
4.3 God as Noncomposite (SCG 1,18)
Continuing with his account of what God is not, Aquinas argues that God is not composite, that God lacks compositio. Since something composite is somehow made up of parts, one might naturally ask what parts Aquinas is thinking of when he declares in SCG 1,18 that God lacks them, that there is no composition in God. Yet Aquinas would have sympathized with this question since he believed that something can be composite in different ways, ones to which he refers in SCG 1,20–27. For the moment, however, let me note that Aquinas always takes what is composite to be potential in some way. “In every composite,” he writes, “there must be act and potency.”12 That is what he is basically saying in SCG 1,18, which can be considered as a kind of overture to the SCG’s treatment of what is commonly referred to as Aquinas’s doctrine of divine simplicity. That overture, I might add, can be taken to continue into SCG 1,19, in which he denies that there is anything “violent or unnatural” in God.13 In SCG 1,19 he effectively says that God cannot be acted on or added to by anything interfering with the divine nature.