9.8 God as Omnipotent (SCG 2,22–29)
9.8 God as Omnipotent (SCG 2,22–29)
It is sometimes said that God is omnipotent because God can do anything. It is also said that there is no omnipotent God since one can easily think of things that God cannot do. If God is incorporeal, for instance, then God obviously cannot eat an ice cream; and it would therefore seem that there are things that God cannot do.24
As we can see from SCG 2,22, however, Aquinas does not construe “God is omnipotent” as “God can do everything.” In other words, he does not think that God is omnipotent because we can tack onto “God can ___” any possible feat we care to mention. His view is that since God is the source of the being of things, since God is pure being and able to create, then God can make to exist anything the existence of which is possible. So, says Aquinas:
Every perfect power reaches out to all those things to which the effect possessed by it through itself and proper to it can extend; whatever can have the character of a dwelling falls within the range of the art of building, if it is perfect. Now, God’s power is through itself the cause of being, and the act of being is his proper effect, as was made clear above [cf. SCG 2,21]. Hence, his power reaches out to all things with which the notion of being is not incompatible; for if God’s power were limited to some particular effect, he would not be through himself the cause of a being as such, but of this particular being. Now, the opposite of being, namely non-being, is incompatible with the notion of being. Hence, God can do all things which do not essentially include the notion of non-being, and such are those which involve a contradiction. It follows, then, that God can do whatever does not imply a contradiction.25
In the last two sentences of this passage, “can do” (potest) clearly means “can bring about” or “can cause to exist” or “can create.” Aquinas does not suppose that God can do anything that something other than God can do, such as eat an ice cream. But he does think that God can make to exist what can be thought to exist absolutely speaking. As he goes on to say, “God is perfect act, possessing in himself the perfections of all things. … His active power, therefore, is perfect, extending to everything not repugnant to the notion of that which is in act; namely to everything except that which implies a contradiction. God, then, is omnipotent as regards all but this.”26
In SCG 2,25 Aquinas happily concedes that there are things that fall outside God’s power but do not fall outside the power of some agents. He argues, for example, that God cannot be a body and cannot be changed. Again, he says, God cannot undergo privation, or forget, or have passions, or sin. In short, Aquinas maintains that it is because God is omnipotent that God cannot eat an ice cream. And, so he also thinks, by virtue of his omnipotence God always acts in conformity to the perfect goodness that God is. God’s acting as a maker, he says, is always directed to the goodness of God. This is the thesis of SCG 2,24, in which Aquinas says: “It is by the wisdom of his intellect, therefore, that God brings things into being.”27
Yet might it not be thought that God’s intellect is limited in its effects as God acts? And might it not be thought that God’s will is limited in the same way? Aquinas turns to these questions in SCG 2,26 and 27. In these chapters he argues:
1. Since God understands all that can proceed from him by understanding his essence (see SCG 1,49 and following), and since God’s power is not limited to producing certain particular effects (see SCG 2,22), God’s intellect is not limited to certain particular effects.
2. God is infinite in essence, unlike anything else (see SCG 1,43). But God’s intellect knows the divine essence perfectly and is therefore “not necessarily confined to these or those effects.”28
3. Since God knows infinite things (see SCG 1,69), and since God brings things into being through his knowledge, “the causality of the divine intellect is not restricted to the production of finite effects.”29
4. God knows “even those things which never are, nor will be, nor have been” (see SCG 1,66). So “it is not by any necessity on the part of his intellect or his knowledge that God works.”30
5. God’s knowledge stands to what he makes as the knowledge of a craftsman stands to what he makes. But God’s craftsmanship extends to making things to exist; it extends to being (see SCG 2,15). So God’s intellect “is not restricted to the production of certain determinate effects.”31
6. Since God’s intellect is not restricted to certain effects, God’s will is not “necessitated to produce certain determinate effects.”32
7. God wills nothing by absolute necessity (see SCG 1,26), so no effects proceed from God’s will by necessity.
One might think that, in creating, God brings into being what, if he is just, he ought to bring into being. Yet, says Aquinas in SCG 2,28, God cannot be thought to create because he owes something to anyone or anything. If God had never created, he observes, nothing would be wronged by this fact since it would not exist in the first place. And nothing can lay claim to being owed anything by God since it has nothing of its own unless God provides it by creating. Again, says Aquinas, to owe something to another is to depend on that other in some way; yet God depends on nothing and can benefit from nothing. Aquinas notes the suggestion that God can only do what he does since “he can do only that which he ought to do.” But, he observes, “God does not produce things from a debt of justice.”33 Yes, he agrees, God is obliged to make such and such if he is to make what depends on there being such and such. So God must make the sun and the moon if he is to make the world in which we live. Yet, Aquinas adds, it does not therefore follow that God, absolutely speaking, is obliged to make the sun and the moon, for God might never have created at all.