6.2 Is God Goodness Itself? (SCG 1,38)
6.2 Is God Goodness Itself? (SCG 1,38)
Some people speak of God’s goodness as an attribute or property that God has, one that he possesses to a high or maximal degree. Aquinas, however, does not talk like this. As I have shown, he thinks that “God is good” is true. As I have also shown, however, Aquinas also holds that God is totally simple and that what God is and the individual that God is are not distinct. Not surprisingly, therefore, Aquinas follows SCG 1,37 with a defense of the claim that God is not just a good thing but is goodness itself (sua bonitas). In SCG 1,38 he offers four main arguments for this conclusion.
First, God is his very act of being (see SCG 1,22). “God is, therefore, goodness itself, and not only good.”3
Second, God’s perfection is not something added to God. It is God’s very substance. It is what God is.4
Third, God has to be goodness itself since goodness is not something in which God participates. It is what God’s essence is. God is Being Itself and, as such, “can participate in nothing.”5
Fourth, if God is entirely simple, then what God is has to be God, in which case God is goodness if God is good.6
As I say, what Aquinas argues in SCG 1,38 comes as no surprise since he draws heavily on what we find earlier in the SCG, especially SCG 1,18, 22, and 37. However, the third argument just noted calls for a bit of explanation because of its appeal to participation. The notion of participation features briefly prior to SCG 1,38. You can find it, for example, in SCG 1,22. I have not, however, offered any explanation of what Aquinas has in mind by the word “participation,” and I should do so now.
For Aquinas, something can be said to participate in F if it is F or has F-ness and if it is something alongside others all of whom are F or who have F-ness.7 I am human, and so are you. Aquinas would put this by saying that we both participate in humanity somehow. Here, of course, Aquinas is trying to do justice to the evident truth that many different things can be somehow the same while also being completely different things. His final position is that this can only be so because there is genuinely something distinguishable from them as individuals, something in which they can be said to share, or to “participate.”
In what sense does Aquinas take the F-ness of X and Y to be different from X and Y? He certainly does not think of it as lying in the fact that the F-ness of X and Y is a substance eternally existing in addition to X and Y, as Plato has been credited to have held. Rather, he holds that we cannot straightforwardly identify individuals in the world with the natures or properties that they have in common or might be said to share. Though I am human, it would be odd for me to declare that I am human nature or that I am humanity. After all, human nature was, presumably, somehow around before I was born, and it will remain around when I am gone. So is there not, therefore, a sense in which human nature can be distinguished from me even though I cannot exist if I cease to be a human being?
Aquinas thinks that there has to be and that human nature, though not a substance, can be distinguished from me as being what I share in but am not to be identified with. He claims that human nature is commonable or shareable even if it is no distinct substance. You might ask how human nature can be anything if it is not a distinct substance or a particular accident had by a human being. Yet Aquinas does not think that “being a substance” or “being an accident” exhausts the possibilities for being. He does not think that God is a particular substance or accident, yet he thinks that God exists. Indeed, as I have shown, he thinks that God is subsisting being (esse). He also thinks that something like human nature can be said to exist since it is exemplified by many things not identical with each other or with the natures that can be ascribed to them.
Now back to the third argument I noted in SCG 1,38. We can represent it thus:
1. Something that is not goodness itself is called “good” with reference to what is distinct from the individual that it is, something “prior” to the good thing in question, something the goodness of which is received by the good thing in question. (Since Aquinas takes it that things can ultimately receive goodness only from what does not itself receive goodness from another, he consequently argues that God, as first cause, cannot be thought of as merely sharing in what good things have but is “good through its own essence.”)8
2. God is pure being or Being Itself. But Being Itself is not potential or derived from another. So, if God is good, then God is goodness itself and not something that is good by sharing in what other things have as derived from God.