6.1 Why Is It True That God Is Good? (SCG 1,37)
6.1 Why Is It True That God Is Good? (SCG 1,37)
In SCG 1,37 Aquinas has four arguments for the truth of “God is good.” They run as follows:
1. That by which something is called good is a virtue that belongs to it. But a virtue is a kind of perfection. So something is good from the fact that it is perfect. Yet God is perfect. So God is good.
2. God is the totally unmoved mover. Some movers can be thought of as self-moved because they act as attracted to certain ends and are not moved by things in the world around them. Such self-moved movers, however, are still moved by objects of desire while a completely unmoved mover moves as being an object of desire. God is such an object and is therefore good.
3. “Good is that which all things desire,” as Aristotle says in book 1 of his Nicomachean Ethics. Now all things, though in different ways, desire to exist and shun their destruction; so being actual is desirable and, therefore, good. Yet God is fully actual and has no potentiality.
4. When things act they bring about goodness in other things since they bring it about that there is some kind of actuality in them. In order to do this, they have to be good or actual in some way. God acts so as to bring about the being and goodness of all that is not divine. So God is good, as the Bible declares.
When reading the above arguments as they occur in the SCG, it will help if you bear the following points in mind.
1. Aquinas is clearly not thinking of “good” as an adjective used so as to indicate that something has a particular physical property or a particular characteristic that sets it off from other things. “John is fat” tells us that John has a particular physical property or attribute. “John is intelligent” tells us that John has a characteristic that some people lack. But Aquinas does not understand “God is good” as comparable to “John is fat” or “John is intelligent.” In SCG 1,37 he is thinking in general terms and saying that God is good since God can be thought of as perfect or desirable. The word “perfect” is not a descriptive adjective like, say, “wooden” (see SCG 1,28). Nor is the word “desirable” a straightforwardly descriptive adjective since different things might be taken to be desirable for different reasons. Yet Aquinas thinks that anything good or perfect has to be actual in some way. He also thinks that anything good or perfect is somehow desirable. It is with these thoughts in mind that he argues that God is good.
2. The word “virtue” in the first argument of SCG 1,37 should not be construed in moral terms. We speak of moral virtues such as prudence, courage, and justice, and we commonly describe people, and not other things, as having virtues. But “virtue” (virtus) in SCG 1,37 means “power” or “ability.” Aquinas is thinking that a good thing is something the powers of which are somehow in order and not inhibited. It is on this basis that he reasons to the conclusion that God, considered as purely actual and as totally simple, is good as lacking nothing needed for his perfection.
3. The second of the above arguments might make sense to you if you bear in mind what Aquinas says in SCG 1,13. As I have shown, he there accepts that some things move themselves in that, like dogs, say, they run around on their own. As I have also shown, however, Aquinas does not think that such self-movers are totally unmoved. He thinks that they are moved by what they desire, that they are drawn to what they find attractive in some way (as, say, a dog is drawn to a bone). So, thinks Aquinas, objects of desire can move movers that seem to be self-moving, and such an object accounts for movement in them. He goes on to say: “This object is higher, in the order or motion, than the mover desiring it; for the one desiring is in a manner a moved mover whereas an appetible object is an absolutely unmoved mover.”2 In SCG 1,37, therefore, Aquinas is proceeding from the idea of being desired to being an unmoved mover, as he takes God to be.
4. In SCG 1,37 Aquinas is not taking “desire” to be ascribable only to people with intelligence who can desire on the basis of what they know to be the case or on the basis of what they might hope to be the case. “Desire” (appetitus in Aquinas’s Latin) might be thought of as inclination or tendency. A cat may pounce on a mouse because it has it in it to be drawn to mice considered as food. With this fact in mind, Aquinas would say that cats “desire” mice since they are inclined to grab them when they see them, or since they have a tendency to do so. Again, Aquinas would say that everything seeks or desires to be itself because, in the absence of interference, it “does its own thing” as the being that it is, whether conscious, like us, or nonconscious, like a plant. It is in this sense that Aquinas holds that the good is what all things desire. They desire it, are inclined to it, or tend to it, just because they are. In SCG 1,37 Aquinas says that “each thing according to its nature resists corruption.” I take him to mean that everything tends to go on existing unless something else interferes with it. So I take him to think that all things “desire” goodness since they tend to continue to exist with the goodness that they have for as long as they exist.