8.8 Moving on to SCG 2
I have shown that in SCG 1 Aquinas chiefly deals with the existence and nature of God. He has some things to say in SCG 1 about what is not divine since he speaks of God as the cause of the existence of creatures and since he draws on what he takes to be truths about certain creatures as he treats of God’s activities of understanding and willing. Yet in SCG 1 Aquinas’s focus is on God in himself, what God is and does simply by existing as God.
For Aquinas, however, God is the creator, and his action or “operation” (operatio) not only includes what is internal to himself, as Aquinas takes God’s understanding and willing to be. In Aquinas’s view God “operates” or acts as a maker, albeit not out of some necessity. So in SCG 2,1 he says that “for a complete study of divine truth, the second operation, whereby things are made and governed by God, remains to be dealt with.”44 This “second operation” of God is the subject matter of SCG 2, in which Aquinas turns to God as active in creatures as their maker and sustainer and in which he turns to human beings and angels considered as things of special interest in the order called into being by God. In the next chapter I will show how he gets started on this project.