11.6 Moving On
Aquinas’s intention in SCG 2 is to follow up SCG 1’s discussion of the existence and nature of God with an account of what God has brought into being as the omnipotent source of all creaturely being. So, having first discussed what God’s power amounts to, SCG 2 proceeds to consider what it means for there to be creatures of God and then goes on to talk about intellectual creatures, considered as the only created things capable of knowing something about God. Yet Aquinas thinks that God, as well as creating things, also governs them in various ways. So he is prepared to make a distinction between God’s making of creatures and his directing of them. As I have shown, Aquinas thinks that God creatively acts as one in whom there is will. He also thinks that what agents produce by will are directed to ends that are intended by what produces them. But what might be the ends to which God directs creatures? And how might they succeed or fail to arrive at these ends? These are the primary questions raised by Aquinas in SCG 3.