8.7 Some Comments on SCG 1,72–102
8.7 Some Comments on SCG 1,72–102
Like his account of God’s knowledge in SCG 1,44–71, Aquinas’s discussion of God’s will, life, and blessedness in SCG 1,72–102 relies heavily on the notion of divine simplicity and would, therefore, seem to stand or fall depending on the cogency of that notion. But, and also like his SCG treatment of God’s knowledge, Aquinas’s SCG discussion of God’s will, life, and blessedness strongly coheres with what precedes it and seems unproblematic given certain premises.
The coherence is most evident in the role that divine simplicity plays in the arguments of SCG 1,72–102. And if, for example, Aquinas is right to say that will follows on knowledge and is, indeed, bound up with it, then it is hard to see how one could rightly deny that God has will if one accepts that God has knowledge, for they seem to come as an inseparable pair.
Again, if one agrees that to be alive is to be self-moving, then it surely has to be true that God is alive if God is the first unmoved mover and the maker of the universe who has intellect and will. And it must also be true that if God is what is enjoyed by people in the beatific vision, then God must be blessed if God knows what God is and wills and willingly rests or delights in what God is.
You may want to dissent from some details in the arguments of SCG 1,72–102, but these chapters have a relentless and inevitable flow to them given their reliance on SCG 1,13–71 and given the truth of the premises to which I have just referred. It has, however, been argued that what Aquinas says about God’s will in SCG 1,72–96 ought to lead him to deny that God has freedom to create. Aquinas asserts that God is free not to create both in his SCG discussion of God’s will and at other points in the SCG, not to mention passages in works other than the SCG. Yet, as I say, it has been suggested that some reasoning in SCG 1,72–96 should have left Aquinas concluding that God lacks freedom when it comes to creating. So let me now say something about that line of argument.42
If God wills himself of necessity, as Aquinas claims in SCG 1,80, and if God wills himself and creatures in a single act of will, as Aquinas claims in SCG 1,76, then does not God necessarily will himself as the creator of what is not divine? And if God does that, then how can God fail to will that creatures should exist? In other words, if God, from eternity, wills what God is, and if God from eternity wills there to be creatures, then God must surely not be free not to create. So, one might think, Aquinas’s account of God’s will conflicts with what he says in SCG 1,81–83, where he denies that God has to create while noting that God is never constrained to choose some particular way to achieve what is good. In circumstances in which I might find myself, I may have no option but to take a plane in order to arrive somewhere by a certain time. Yet, thinks Aquinas, God cannot be thought ever to be constrained by options in this way. According to Aquinas, God unfailingly wills what is good without having to will a means to what is good. But if God unfailingly wills himself, and if God eternally wills to create what is not divine, how can God fail not to will what is not divine?
So, one might think, Aquinas really ought to be denying freedom to God when it comes to creating. Yet there are reasons to think otherwise, and these largely lie in what Aquinas says in the SCG concerning what cannot be true of God.
Aquinas does not think of God as needing creatures in any significant way. I need to eat so as to survive, but Aquinas’s account of God in the SCG clearly rules out the idea of God depending on something in order to survive. It also rules out the idea of God being forced to do something by an agent acting on God. So, thinks Aquinas, we cannot suppose that God, by nature or causal influence, is compelled to create. Aquinas, as I have shown, develops his philosophy of God in the SCG by asking why there is motion and why there is something rather than nothing. In doing so he reasons that God has to act in or on things without being efficiently caused to do so. He, therefore, concludes that what God produces can only be thought of as what God has chosen to produce, which seems to entail that God does not have to create a world of creatures. To be sure, Aquinas accepts that God has eternally willed to create. But, as Aquinas points out in SCG 1,83, this only means that it is necessary that God has created on the supposition that God, from eternity, has decreed to create. It does not mean that God is compelled to create. As I have shown, in SCG 1,37 Aquinas supports the idea that “the good is diffusive of itself and of being.”43 But he does not take this thesis as entailing that God has to make good things other than himself to exist. He thinks of the thesis as stating that what is good always attracts those able to recognize it and share somehow in it. He does not take it to mean that a good thing is compelled to produce another good thing, and he does not think that God has to create what is good just because he is good. Aquinas maintains that God is good and that he wills creatures to exist so as to share in his goodness insofar as creatures can be thought to share in what God is by existing and being good. But he does not say anything to suggest that God has to create creatures or that God is compelled to do so by nature or anything outside him, and it is not at all obvious that what he does say in the SCG ought to force him to conclude that God has to create. Quite the opposite.
In this connection we should also remember that the natural theology of SCG 1 is something that Aquinas develops on the basis of premises that he thinks we can take to be true on the basis of observation coupled with other premises that are not based on observation. So, among other things, he notes that there are things that do not exist by nature, things that he thinks might never have existed, and he thinks that their being able not to exist has nothing to do with God but consists in what they are by nature. Hence the question “Why do they exist if what they are does not guarantee their existence at all times?” That things in the world do not have to exist is a critical premise in the natural theology of the SCG. So Aquinas can hardly be dismissing it when he writes as he does concerning God’s will. As he does so, he is (1) assuming that there might have been nothing at all since the existence of things in the world is not explained by noting what they are, and (2) presuming that what exists but does not do so by nature has to have a cause that wills it into being. In the SCG Aquinas never says anything to suggest that the “able not to exist” aspect of creatures should be thought to lead us to conclude that God cannot but create. If Aquinas thought this, then his natural theology in the SCG would be totally undermined since it depends so heavily on the idea that creatures, who do not have to exist by nature, have to derive from what does exist by nature. In short, conclusions about what God has to produce should surely take account of whether or not what God has actually produced is, regardless of theological considerations, something that cannot but exist. Or so Aquinas thinks.