9.4 God as Creator (SCG 2,15–21)
9.4 God as Creator (SCG 2,15–21)
Aquinas states the presiding thesis of SCG 2,15–17 right at the start of SCG 2,15: “Everything besides God derives its being from him.”12 According to Aquinas, everything nondivine is being made to exist for as long as it exists. Or, as he goes on to say: “Everything which is in any way at all must then derive its being from that whose being has no cause. … God is being in the highest mode. Therefore, he is the cause of all things of which being is predicated. … Above all causes, then, there must be a cause whose proper action is to give being. … Everything that is must, therefore, be from God.”13
In SCG 2,15 he offers the following arguments for this thesis.
1. What does not belong to something as such belongs to it through a cause.
2. Nothing can as such belong to two things since what belongs to something as such is limited to that thing, as, for example, having three angles equal to two right angles is proper only to triangles.
3. “So, if something belongs to two things, it will not belong to both as such.”14
4. So nothing can be predicated of two things “so as to be said of neither of them by reason of a cause.”15
5. Being is predicated of everything that exists.
6. So there cannot be two things neither of which has a cause of its being; either both must exist through a cause, or the one must be the cause of the other’s being.
7. Yet God is the being whose existence has no cause (see SCG 1,13).
In this argument “belonging to something as such” means “belonging uniquely to something,” as, say, being feline is unique to cats, or as, to take Aquinas’s example, having three angles equal to two right angles is unique to triangles. So Aquinas is arguing that what does not belong uniquely to something has to derive from something outside it. He is then arguing that being is predicable of everything that exists, which he takes to mean that, unless it belongs to that the existence of which has no cause (that which exists “as such”), it does not belong to anything “as such.”
1. Whatever something possesses essentially or by nature cannot be diminished or deficient in it; otherwise it would completely cease to exist.
2. If what it takes for something to exist remains in it intact, and if the thing is somehow diminished, the diminution must be caused by something other than the nature of the thing.
3. So what belongs to one thing less than to other things does not belong to it because of its nature; it belongs to it because of some other cause.
4. So “that thing of which a genus is chiefly predicated will be the cause of everything in that genus.”16
5. But God is being in the highest degree (see SCG 1,13); so God is “the cause of all things of which being is predicated.”17
1. Causes and effects are ordered to each other.
2. What is common among effects derives from a common cause.
3. Being is common to everything that exists, so there must be a cause able to give being.
4. God is the first cause (see SCG 1,13). So everything that exists must derive from God.
1. “The cause of everything said to be such and such by way of participation is that which is said to be so by virtue of its essence.”18
2. God is being by his essence, so everything that exists participates in God’s act of being, which belongs only to God (see SCG 1,42). So God causes being in all other things.
1. What is equally able to exist or not exist must be caused to exist by something else, for what is able to exist or not to exist is, by itself, “indifferent” when it comes to being or not being.
2. There must, therefore, be something that has to exist and that causes to exist all that can be or not be, and that even causes the existence of things not able to be or not to be while deriving their necessary existence from something else. This is what God is: a necessary being that causes to exist all things that can either exist or not exist, and a necessary being that is necessary of itself.19
1. God’s actuality somehow includes the perfections of all things (see SCG 1,28).
2. So God is the maker of all things—bearing in mind that nothing other than God is able to exist without deriving from God.
1. Imperfect things have their origin in what is perfect.
2. But God is the most perfect thing and the highest good (see SCG 1,28 and 41).