8.5 Aquinas on God’s Life (SCG 1,97–99)
8.5 Aquinas on God’s Life (SCG 1,97–99)
When it comes to God’s life, Aquinas picks up on his general view of what is common to living things as I noted it above. “To live,” he says in SCG 1,97, “is attributed to some beings because they are seen to move themselves, but not to be moved by another.”35 On this account, Aquinas goes on to say, God is supremely alive since “He does not act from another, but through himself, since he is the first agent.”36 Aquinas also argues that God is alive since God understands, wills, and “comprehends every perfection of being.”37 And God, Aquinas maintains, must be his life since God is entirely simple and since all that is in God is God (SCG 1,98). Since Aquinas takes God to be eternal, he goes on in SCG 1,99 to add that God’s life is without end. He writes: “Nothing ceases to live except through separation from life. But nothing can be separated from God, since every separation takes place through the division of something from something. It is therefore impossible that God cease to live, since God is his life.”38 Again, says Aquinas, anything that exists at some time and that does not exist at another has a cause of its existence, while God has no cause and does not live at some time and not at other times. God, Aquinas finally argues, has to live eternally since God exists tota simul, without successiveness (see SCG 1,15) and since God is wholly immutable. God, Aquinas observes, “neither began to live, nor will cease to live, nor in living does he suffer any succession. Therefore his life is everlasting.”39