8.4 Aquinas on Will in God (SCG 1,72–96)
8.4 Aquinas on Will in God (SCG 1,72–96)
SCG 1,72–96 defends these theses:
1. God has will.
2. God’s will is God’s essence.
3. God principally wills the divine essence.
4. In willing himself God also wills other things.
5. God wills himself and other things by one act of will.
6. God’s willing different things is compatible with him being totally simple.
7. God’s will extends to particular or singular goods.
8. God wills even things that do not yet exist.
9. God wills his own being and goodness of necessity.
10. God does not will other things of absolute necessity.
11. God cannot will what is in itself impossible.
12. God’s will is no threat to there being contingency in things and does not impose necessity on them.
13. Reason can be assigned to God’s will.
14. Nothing can cause God to will.
15. God has free choice.
16. God does not have passions arising from appetites.
17. There is delight and joy in God even though God is perfect.
18. There is love in God.
19. Virtue can be ascribed to God.
20. There are moral virtues in God having to do with action.
21. There are contemplative virtues in God.
22. God cannot will evil.
23. God hates nothing.
That is a long list of theses. If you compare them with those defended in SCG 1,44–72, you will notice a certain similarity in the progression of Aquinas’s reasoning as he writes SCG 1,72–96 and SCG 1,44–72. In his discussion of God’s knowledge, Aquinas asks whether God has knowledge, whether God’s knowledge is his essence, whether God knows what is not divine, whether God’s knowledge imposes necessity on things, whether God knows singulars, whether God knows what is contingent, and whether God knows evils. In SCG 1,72–96 Aquinas raises comparable questions when it comes to God’s will, and the way he answers them can be compared with the way he previously deals with God’s knowledge. So I am now going to note how Aquinas defends the fifteen theses just noted while trying not to repeat myself too much when it comes to what I have said in chapter 7.
8.4.1 There Is Will in God (SCG 1,72)
Aquinas thinks that there being will in God follows from God having intellect. God, he says, understands what is good, and “the understood good is the proper object of the will.”6 Indeed, he adds, “all sensing and understanding beings have appetite and will.”7 Furthermore, says Aquinas, everything seeks its perfection, and intellectual beings do so through will; so in God there is will “by which his being and his goodness are pleasing to him.”8 Aquinas also argues: (1) with perfection of understanding comes delight, yet God understands perfectly; (2) God produces things by his intellect, so God must have will; (3) will is the first moving power in things with intellect, so God must have will; (4) freedom involves acting on one’s own voluntarily, but God is the first agent acting through himself; (5) as knowing himself to be supremely good, God must desire the divine goodness as an end by means of will.
8.4.2 God’s Will Is God’s Essence (SCG 1,73)
Aquinas says that God’s will is God’s essence since God has will insofar as he has intellect and since God has intellect or understanding by his essence (see SCG 1,45 and 46). Furthermore, argues Aquinas: (1) God’s understanding is his being (esse), as must be his willing; (2) God acts through his essence and must therefore will through his essence; (3) God cannot have will as an accident since God is simple; so the divine will is not something added to the divine essence.
8.4.3 God Principally Wills the Divine Essence (SCG 1,74)
Aquinas holds that what God principally understands is the divine essence (see SCG 1,48). So, he argues, this is what God principally wills. He also argues: (1) God cannot principally will something other than God since that would mean that there is something greater than God; (2) if God principally willed something other than himself, then something other than God would cause his willing, which is impossible; (3) things with will principally will their ultimate good while willing other things as a means of obtaining it; but the ultimate good is God (see SCG 1,41), so God is the principal object of the divine will; (4) powers in things are directly related to and measured by their principal objects, so the principal object of the divine will is the divine essence and all that it amounts to.9
8.4.4 In Willing Himself God Wills Other Things (SCG 1,75)
I have shown that Aquinas takes God to know what is not divine by knowing himself as their cause. In SCG 1,75 he argues that God wills what is not God by willing himself while making to exist things that are ordered to him as to an end. He also argues: (1) we will goodness or perfection for things that we love for their own sake; yet God wills what God is for its own sake, and in doing so wills things other than God insofar as they reflect what is in God; (2) to love (will) something in itself and for its own sake is to love everything in which it is found; but God loves his own being in itself and for its own sake; so God loves what shares in God’s being by reflecting it and being made by him, and God loves what preexists in him as a model or pattern in the light of which he makes things to be; (3) in willing the divine essence, God can will things directed to it as drawn to it, even if they are not divine, and this means that God, being perfect in power, is something that wills whatever exists apart from God as being drawn to goodness; (4) God understands other things in himself, so “he principally wills himself, and wills all other things in willing himself.”10
8.4.5 God Wills Himself and Other Things by One Act of Will (SCG 1,76)
Obviously Aquinas has to say that there is but one act of will in God because he takes God to be simple and immutable. His account of God earlier in the SCG says that God is eternal and does not have any before and after in him. So Aquinas is committed to there being nothing successive in God when it comes to willing. For him, all that is in God is the simple divine essence that is God. As you will see if you work through them, all of the arguments in SCG 1,76 seem to be grounded in this thought, so I shall not now try to summarize them in detail.
8.4.6 That God Wills Many Things Does Not Undermine God’s Simplicity (SCG 1,77)
Many times over in SCG 1, and elsewhere in the SCG, Aquinas begins chapters by declaring that what he is about to say in them follows from what he has previously shown, and he does so at the start of SCG 1,77. Maybe I should have mentioned this before, but I do not take Aquinas, when writing the SCG, to suppose himself to have already established certain conclusions that he goes on to defend before he tries to defend them. If he thought that he had done that, then he could have spared himself the trouble of offering particular arguments for conclusions he proceeds to defend. What he seems to mean while beginning chapters with phrases like “from this it follows” or “from this it is apparent” is that what he has previously said can be drawn on while arguing for conclusions not specifically defended previously. That this is so seems clear from SCG 1,77.
Here Aquinas first says: “From this it follows that the multitude of the objects of the will is not opposed to the unity and simplicity of the divine substance.”11 But Aquinas then goes on to explain why this is so by giving arguments that he has not already presented in SCG 1. These arguments presume that God is simple and that God has knowledge and will, but they add to what Aquinas has previously said about God presuming that God wills many things. And the arguments are: (1) If God’s will is but a single thing, the fact that God wills many things does not entail that there is complexity in him; (2) God wills other things by willing his own goodness, yet “all things in his goodness are one, since other things are in him according to his way,”12 and since God’s will and intellect exist in God, who is totally simple. In addition, says Aquinas, “that something be related to many is not opposed to its simplicity, since unity itself is the principle of numerical multitude.”13
8.4.7 God’s Will Extends to Singular Goods (SCG 1,78)
God’s simplicity, Aquinas holds, does not prevent him willing many particular things since the complexity involved in many things being willed by God lies in them, not in God, who is the first and best thing. Again, says Aquinas, each particular good thing deriving from God derives its being and goodness from God, meaning that God’s will extends to every particular good thing. Yet again, argues Aquinas: (1) God as the source of all that is divine must will their end and must will each of them as directed to it; (2) if God did not will singular goods, then the good of order in the universe would have arisen by chance whereas it actually arises by virtue of God’s action; (3) since God understands particular goods, God must will particular goods.
8.4.8 God Wills Things That Do Not Yet Exist (SCG 1,79)
Having noted some reasons why it might be thought wrong to suppose that God can will what does not yet exist, Aquinas maintains that God can do this as eternally willing a world in which things arise in time. God can do this, he says, even if things come to exist over time.
8.4.9 God Wills His Being and Goodness of Necessity (SCG 1,80)
In SCG 1,80 Aquinas argues that since desire or will cannot but home in on what is absolutely perfect or good, God must will himself and his goodness of necessity since God is absolute perfection and goodness. Aquinas knows that we sometimes turn our backs on certain goods. His explanation of this is that we do so because we take some goods to be greater than others, as when I value dental hygiene more than a few moments of comfort away from a dentist’s chair. On the other hand Aquinas thinks that if we knew what is absolutely good without any qualification, we would will it since it belongs to will to be drawn to goodness as such. So in SCG 1,80 he reasons that God wills or loves his own goodness with no possibility of failing to do so. That, Aquinas thinks, is because there can be no good perceived by God as a rival to the good that God is. This good, says Aquinas, is what God principally wills (see SCG 1,74), and he wills other things as ordered to it.
8.4.10 God Does Not Will Other Things Necessarily (SCG 1,81)
Does the line of thought in SCG 1,80 imply that God has to will things other than himself? Aquinas says that it does not. God wills other things as directed to his goodness, but God’s perfect goodness does not depend on there being any creatures ordered to God. “Since the divine goodness can be without other things,” Aquinas observes, “it is under no necessity to will other things from the fact of willing its own goodness.”14 Aquinas goes on to note that there could be many more good and different things than there are, which he takes to imply that God does not necessarily will what actually exists other than him. In this connection Aquinas argues that since God’s goodness is infinite, as God is, it can be shared in an infinite number of ways and in ways other than the ways it is shared in by creatures that now exist. He continues:
If, then, as a result of willing his own goodness, God necessarily willed the things that participate in it, it would follow that he would will the existence of an infinity of creatures participating in his goodness in an infinity of ways. This is patently false, because, if he willed them, they would be, since his will is the principle of being for things.15
Given this conclusion, one might ask: “If, in understanding and willing himself, God understands and knows other things (see SCG 1,49 and 75), how can God necessarily know what is not divine without willing it of necessity?” Aquinas’s answer is that God’s goodness does not require that other things exist, so God can will his own goodness without being compelled to will other things, even though God knows what he could create as ordered to his goodness but does not create. In Aquinas’s view, God does not will “all the things that can have an order to his goodness,” but “God knows all things that have any order whatever to his essence, by which he understands.”16 In SCG 1,82 Aquinas notes arguments to the effect that there is some impossibility entailed by the thesis that God does not necessarily will what is other than himself (e.g., that if this is so, then God is indifferent when it comes to what he does and therefore contains potentiality or is moved to will by something other than himself). Yet Aquinas responds to these arguments by reiterating his reasons for concluding that God does not necessarily will what is other than himself. In SCG 1,83, however, he accepts that God wills something other than himself with what he calls “the necessity of supposition” (ex conditione vel suppositione). Since God is immutable and eternal, says Aquinas, then what he wills cannot not be. Yet, he adds, this does not mean that God from eternity has to will things other than himself. If he wills them, then they are inevitable, but only on condition of his willing them.
8.4.11 God Cannot Will What Is in Itself Impossible (SCG 1,84)
The main idea running through SCG 1,84 is that God cannot will what is impossible since what is impossible cannot exist and, therefore, cannot be willed into existence by God. “In so far as a thing is opposed to the nature of being as such,” says Aquinas, “there cannot be preserved in it the likeness of the first being, namely the divine being, which is the source of being.”17 Aquinas accepts that God can will to exist what is able to exist. Yet he denies that God can make to exist what cannot possibly exist. He does not use this example in SCG 1,84, but he is clearly thinking that, for example, there cannot be a square triangle since “square” and “triangle” cancel each other out in “There is a square triangle,” which, therefore, does not amount to a coherent thought about anything that might exist.
In SCG 1,85 Aquinas is arguing that God makes things to be what they are, whether contingent or necessary, whether able to be or not to be, or whether not able to be or not to be. Here we need to remember that Aquinas holds that some creatures are contingent and that some are necessary. He thinks that some creatures are contingent since they do not always exist. He also thinks that some creatures act without being necessitated or determined to act as they do by other things in the world. In addition, he thinks that there are things that always exist since they are not generated and cannot perish in the course of nature. Yet, he maintains, all of these things are what they are and only exist because of God, the first cause of everything, even of what is contingent in some way. God, says Aquinas, “wills whatever is required for a thing that he wills … but it befits certain things, according to the mode of their nature, that they be contingent and not necessary.”18 Aquinas agrees that if God wills something, it will be. But he does not therefore conclude that everything that God wills to be has to be something necessary.
8.4.13 A Reason Can Be Assigned to the Divine Will (SCG 1,86)
In defending what he does in SCG 1,86, Aquinas is ascribing ratio to divine willing. The Latin word ratio can be understood in various senses, but in SCG 1,86 it means something like “aim” or “end” or “goal” as intended by what has intellect. So, in SCG 1,86 Aquinas reiterates what he has said about God willing with a view to a good, this, as I have shown, chiefly being the goodness that is God and the goodness had by creatures reflecting God’s goodness. Aquinas, therefore, thinks that God delights in, or wills, himself as perfect goodness, and that God wills to share this goodness with creatures that reflect it as things whose good exists in God before it exists in them. Aquinas holds that God is supremely good, that God makes creatures to share in goodness, and that God, so to speak, has in himself a blueprint of what creatures are and what is good for them. In this sense, Aquinas thinks of God as the beginning and end of creatures by being their cause and by being what they aim at as creatures of God. So he thinks that what is in God, who is entirely simple, is what God aims at both for himself and for what he has created, and he argues that this has to be the goodness that God is willing, that it has to be its ratio. So in SCG 1,86 we read: “The end is the reason for willing things that are for the sake of an end. But God wills his own goodness as the end, and other things he wills as things that are for the sake of the end. His goodness, therefore, is the reason why he wills the other things which are different from himself.”19 Aquinas makes it clear in SCG 1,86 that God sometimes wills what falls short in goodness in some ways (though, as I have shown, he takes everything to be good insofar as it merely exists). Yet, he thinks, in willing as he does when it comes to creatures, God’s aim is to produce what shares somehow in his goodness, and he takes goodness as it exists in God and is shared by creatures in different ways to be God’s ratio when it comes to willing.
8.4.14 Nothing Can Be the Cause of God’s Willing (SCG 1,87)
One might expect to find Aquinas arguing in SCG 1,87 that nothing causes God’s will because God’s will is God and God is the first cause. Yet that is not quite what he explicitly argues in this chapter. He begins by saying that though a certain reason can be given for the divine will, this does not entail that anything is the cause of God’s willing since the cause of the will willing is the end willed and because the end willed by God is God’s own goodness and his act of will. Aquinas adds that no object willed by God causes God’s willing, though one of them can be thought of as causing another to be ordered to God’s goodness, in which case God wills one thing for the sake of another. In addition, Aquinas argues, there is in God’s willing no discursiveness (discursus), no running through a process of reasoning (see SCG 1,57). “By means of one act,” Aquinas says, “God wills his goodness and all other things, since his action is his essence.”20
8.4.15 There Is Free Choice in God (SCG 1,88)
By “free choice” (liberum arbitrium) Aquinas means the power to choose not from necessity but of one’s own accord, and he argues that this has to exist in God since God wills other things without being compelled to do so (see SCG 1,81). In SCG 1,88 Aquinas also argues: (1) that people exercising free choice will by reason, not by the impulse of nature, while “towards the things to which it is not determined by nature”21 the divine will is inclined through intellect; (2) that we freely will ends by electing or choosing what is for the sake of an end, while God wills himself as an end and other things for the sake of this end; and (3) that people with free choice are masters of their acts, while God is supremely this since his action depends on nothing other than himself.
8.4.16 There Are No Passions of the Appetites in God (SCG 1,89)
By “passions of the appetites” (passiones affectuum) Aquinas means desires arising from things that can be sensed. So in SCG 1,89 he dismisses the suggestion that passions of the appetites exist in God since God is noncorporeal, immutable, and lacking potentiality. All of the arguments in SCG 1,89 are variations on this master argument.
8.4.17 There Is Delight and Joy in God (SCG 1,90)
Aquinas holds that delight (delectatio) and joy (gaudium) exist in God because God rests content with the goodness that God is.22 There can, Aquinas concedes, be delight and joy that amounts to a passion had by physical beings such as us, and he is clear that there cannot be delight and joy of this kind in God. But, he observes, delight and joy can be intellectual and not grounded in “sensible appetite,” and there is nothing to prevent God having delight and joy in the intellectual sense. Aquinas goes on to say that God, who principally wills himself as goodness without reservation, must be “supremely at rest in himself, as containing all abundance in himself.”23 He adds that God perfectly understands and must be full of delight because of this, and that God takes joy in every good as people take joy in good things unless they threaten them in some way. “Every good is a likeness of the divine good,” he says. He adds, “Nor does God lose any good because of some good.”24
8.4.18 There Is Love in God (SCG 1,91)
By now you will not be expecting Aquinas to say that love exists in God as an enduring passion sparked off by physical contact with something (emotional love, as we might call this). But he does hold that there can be love insofar as one thing wills the good of something else as its own good, and with this thought in mind Aquinas argues that there is love in God since God does will the good of other things as their own good, for the sake of these other things. “God,” he says, “wills his own good and that of others” and “wills the good of each thing according as it is the good of each thing.”25 The remaining arguments of SCG 1,91 are variations on this argument coupled with appeal to the Bible as saying that there is joy and delight in God. It is, says Aquinas, “apparent from what has been said that, from among our affections, there is none that can properly exist in God save only joy and love; although even these are not in God as passions, as they are in us.”26
8.4.19 Virtues Can Be Ascribed to God (SCG 1,92)
Aquinas thinks that people, considered as voluntary agents and as able to make discrete choices, can come to acquire certain virtues over time. And he thinks of these virtues as dispositions that we have toward acting well as human beings, dispositions, indeed, that we need in order to be good as things of the kind to which we belong.27 Given what I have now shown him arguing in the SCG, Aquinas cannot think that God has virtues as we have them, for he takes God to be eternal, immutable, noncomposite, and lacking in potentiality, which we are not, and which nothing can be if it has acquirable dispositions or dispositions that can be lost. Yet in SCG 1,92 Aquinas argues that God can be thought to have virtues insofar as he is totally good and the source of goodness in creatures. “Virtue is a certain goodness in the virtuous,” he observes. He adds: “Therefore the divine goodness must contain in its way all the virtues.”28 Note, however, that Aquinas takes the qualification “in its way” very seriously. God, he insists, cannot have virtues considered as dispositions or habits (habitus). In short, Aquinas is clear in SCG 1,92 that God is not morally virtuous as we can be and that there are human virtues that cannot possibly be ascribed to God precisely because they are dispositions that people need in order to display goodness as people. Again, therefore, the principal thesis of SCG 1,92 is, and only is, that God is perfectly good and contains in some sense the goodness enjoyed by anything that has goodness. As I shall now show, however, Aquinas still thinks that some specific virtues can be ascribed to God.
8.4.20 In God There Are Moral Virtues That Deal with Actions (SCG 1,93)
Aquinas begins SCG 1,93 with this sentence: “Now, there are some virtues directing the active life of people that do not deal with passions, but with actions: for example, truth (veritas), justice (justitia), liberality (liberalitas), magnificence (magnificenia), prudence (prudentia), and art (ars).”29
In SCG 1,93 Aquinas regards these virtues as embodying goodness related to action. And he thinks that they can be ascribed to God in “his way,” not “our way,” because of what God has brought about or made to exist. So, Aquinas argues: (1) art can be said to be in God since God makes things to be in accordance with an understood plan; (2) God guides things by his knowledge, so prudence can be ascribed to him; (3) God variously wills that things should have what they need, so justice, considered as giving something that it needs, can be ascribed to God; (4) God distributes goodness to things without seeking gain for himself, so there is liberality in him; (5) the virtue of truth is had by someone who does and says what the person is, yet “all things that receive being from God must bear his likeness in so far as they are, are good, and have their proper models,”30 so there is truth in God. As he concludes SCG 1,93, Aquinas touches on ways in which God cannot have some of the virtues to which he has just referred. He notes, for example, that God cannot be prudent because he takes advice from people who might know more than he does. Again, he says that God cannot possess commutative justice (i.e., the justice involved in paying back what one owes) since God has not received anything from anyone.
8.4.21 There Are Contemplative Virtues in God (SCG 1,94)
In SCG 1,94, Aquinas is concentrating on wisdom and understanding, which he takes to be virtues in people but which he also takes to exist in God, in “his way” for reasons that I have now shown in some detail.
8.4.22 God Cannot Will Evil (SCG 1,95)
Aquinas begins SCG 1,95 by saying “From what has been said it can be shown that God cannot will evil.”31 In fleshing out this comment Aquinas argues: (1) God cannot will what is evil since God is entirely good; (2) will aims at evil only because of error since the object of will is the good as understood, yet there is no error in God; (3) God’s will cannot be turned from willing the good that God is. No surprises in this chapter, therefore, or in SCG 1,96 for that matter.
8.4.23 God Hates Nothing (SCG 1,96)
Since Aquinas takes hating something to mean willing badness for it, he thinks that God can hate nothing since his will is always turned to the goodness that he is and to the goodness of things existing as created by him. So, he says, “If the will of God cannot be inclined to evil. … It is impossible that he should hate anything.”32 If God truly hated something, adds Aquinas, then he would will it not to exist. But God makes everything that exists to exist, so “God wills good to each thing” and therefore “hates nothing.”33 You may think that God hates some things because he permits various evils to exist, and, as I will show, Aquinas turns to a discussion of God and existing evils in SCG 3. In SCG 1,96, however, he is arguing that God cannot directly will evil as an end in itself and, therefore, cannot be said to hate anything, to target it specifically as something in which he wills evil to exist. He agrees that God sometimes wills there to be things that eat away at the good of other things. But he does not take this to mean that there are real or actual things that God hates. Again, Aquinas concedes that God wills certain goods that “cannot be without the loss of some lesser good.”34 Yet he does not take this to mean that God positively hates anything. He takes it to mean that God sometimes wills goods that are necessarily bound up with there being evils of certain kinds.