9.3 God and Relations (SCG 2,11–14)
9.3 God and Relations (SCG 2,11–14)
Since Aquinas thinks that God has power with respect to his effects, he thinks that we can speak of God as related to them. And, since Aquinas holds that God’s effects derive from God, he maintains that creatures can be said to be related to God. He also thinks that God produces what is somehow like God, that God knows his effects, that God moves things, and that God is first among beings. So in SCG 2,11 Aquinas is happy to say that “something is said of God in relation to creatures.”10
In SCG 2,12, however, we find Aquinas (curiously, you might think) maintaining that “relations predicated of God in reference to creatures do not really exist in him.”11 Here I take him to mean that, whatever we might hold to be true of God as the creator of his creatures, his relation to them does not involve any modification or change in him. If I feed my cat, I act as an agent cause with respect to it, and my doing so involves certain changes in me. I move around, procure cat food, place it before the cat, and so on. These changes really exist in me. They are changes that I undergo. So my being the feeder of my cat includes my undergoing changes, meaning that I am related to my cat as its feeder as something undergoing change. As I have shown, however, Aquinas denies that God really changes since he takes God to be pure act and as lacking potentiality. So when it comes to relations predicated of God in reference to creatures, Aquinas’s position is that these should not be thought of as relations involving changes in God.
Yet, thinks Aquinas, we can say that God is my creator and is the cause of any changes that I undergo. In this sense, he concedes, God is related to me. But not as modified by being so. For Aquinas, God is the eternal and unchangeable divine essence. So he thinks that language by which we truly express how creatures stand to God as their cause should not be taken to imply that the truth that it expresses implies that God is first like this and then like that, that God undergoes change. Aquinas presumes that we often have to talk about God as if he were an object in the world related to other things as things in the world are related to each other. He presumes that because he recognizes that we are stuck with talking of the totally simple as if it were somehow composite (unless we spend time noting the differences between God and creatures that Aquinas flags in SCG 1). Yet Aquinas also thinks that reflection should lead us to recognize that, say, affirming that God is my creator should not be taken to suggest that God somehow became different from what he eternally is when I came to exist. In other words, while Aquinas thinks that something true can be said of God in relation to creatures, he does not believe that what God brings about when it comes to creatures involves God becoming different from what he eternally is. I cannot be the feeder of my cat without going through certain processes. Yet, thinks Aquinas, God can be, or even be truly said to become to be, the creator of me without himself changing in any real way. Such is the basic argument of SCG 2,11–14, which views relations predicated of God in reference to creatures as being true because of what is going on with creatures as made to be by God, not because of a series of events in the life or being of God as he wills to create and as what he wills to create exists.