13.1 Creatures Aiming at God (SCG 3,16–25)
13.1 Creatures Aiming at God (SCG 3,16–25)
When Aquinas says that creatures aim at, tend to, or intend an end, he means that they ultimately operate as seeking what is good.1 In thinking this, however, he is reasoning analogically.
We would have no problem with statements like “John was aiming to please Mary by buying her flowers,” or “When buying her flowers, John was intending to please Mary,” or “John was seeking to please Mary by buying her flowers.” The verbs “to aim,” “to intend,” and “to seek” are quite at home when it comes to referring to what people do. Indeed, when we speak of something aiming or intending or seeking, we first of all think of the something in question being human.
As I have shown, however (see chapter 5, section 2 here), Aquinas holds that one and the same word can be used in different but related senses given certain connections between what it signifies when used to talk about different things. We might spontaneously think that only people aim or intend or seek. Yet cats can surely be thought of as aiming at mice when trying to pounce on them, and arrows can surely be said to be aiming at a target when directed to one by an archer. And, though intention might be taken to be only ascribable to thinking things, tending to an end can be ascribed to nonthinking things, as when we say that cats tend to chase mice, or that daffodil bulbs tend to produce yellow flowers, or that acid tends to burn. Again, while it might be thought that people are the highest class of seekers in the world, it makes sense to say that, as tending to certain ends, other things in the world can be spoken of as seeking. Cats seek food. Plants seek moisture as they extend their roots.
In other words, as substances of different kinds can be thought of as having certain ways of working, so can they be thought of as tending in various ways: tending, Aquinas thinks, in ways that benefit them. Of course, not all tending to benefits things that tend since disaster can strike something tending to an end, and Aquinas is obviously aware of this. On the other hand, though, he thinks that, unless interfered with, substances tend to what is objectively good for them. You might say that people often tend to what is objectively bad for them. Again, though, Aquinas is aware of this and would say that people tend to what they intellectually take to be good.
So Aquinas thinks that many different things aim, tend to, and seek. His view is that, by virtue of having characteristic ways of behaving, all naturally occurring things that operate or act also aim, tend to, or seek. But why should they be thought of as aiming at God or as tending to God or seeking God? For Aquinas, they do so because God is their maker.
At this point, consider human beings who make things. What are they doing? They are bringing about something that they intend to bring about, something that they think of as good. If I want to make a clock, then I will normally want to make a good clock.2 Human makers intend to bring about what is good in some way, and their succeeding in doing so both fulfils their intention as makers and results in something that amounts to goodness or perfection in what they produce. The goodness of what I might make is in what I make as reflecting what is in me as aiming at it.
Yet now consider naturally occurring things. For example, consider my cat Sweetie. Can he be said to be good as reflecting an aim intended by the maker of cats? Aquinas thinks that he can. He thinks that Sweetie is a good cat insofar as he reflects what God aims at in making good cats. Sweetie, of course, can be thought as being made by its parent cats. Yet these obviously cannot be thought of as makers that determine what cats are, for they are themselves cats. I can determine what some artifact I produce is; but no cat can determine what a cat is. All it can do is reproduce itself. If anything can be thought of a maker of cats, it cannot be a cat; it must be something that makes it be that there are cats that can make other cats.
Now, Aquinas holds that God is the ultimate maker since God is the maker of all things, the creator of everything that is not divine. So, he thinks, the actions of all things reflect God’s intention for them as their maker, rather as a clock can reflect the intentions of a clockmaker. Their aiming at what is good amounts to an embodiment of a blueprint in God’s mind, so to speak. What they aim at is in God before it is in them: in God before being in them because they are reflecting what God intends them to be. For Aquinas, the goodness at which creatures aim, and their aiming at this goodness, is in God as their maker. In seeking their goodness, they are seeking what God intends.
In this sense, thinks Aquinas, even Sweetie is seeking God. For, thinks Aquinas, when aiming for ends, he is seeking what is in the intention of God as his maker. In Aquinas’s view, what creatures tend to derives from and is in God. He therefore thinks that, since God is the primary maker, creatures acting for ends are always seeking what is in God as making them. As Herbert McCabe succinctly observes, according to Aquinas:
God is the ultimate maker, and, as such, the ultimately desirable, the ultimate good. Every creature, just in naturally tending to its own goodness, is seeking God as what ultimately intends it, as its maker. And this is what, for Aquinas, the goodness of God is first of all about: it is the goodness, the attractiveness or desirability inseparable from being Creator. God is the omega because he is the alpha, the end because he is the beginning. God is good because he is the Creator; not, first, in the moral sense that it was very good of him to create us and we should be grateful, but in the metaphysical sense that, being Creator he must be the ultimate object of our desire, without which we would have no desires. Aquinas puts this point by saying that each creature tends to its own natural perfection, but God “contains the perfections of all things,” meaning not that he is all things, but that, as maker, he intends their perfections. God has these perfections, says Aquinas, “in a higher way,” in the way that they are in the intention of the maker before they are in the thing made—not before in time but in the sense that the presence of these perfections in the made things depends on them being the intention of the maker.3
McCabe did not intend to do so, but I take him in this passage to provide an admirable paraphrase of the reasoning in SCG 3,16–24. In these chapters Aquinas is not asking us to believe that all creatures consciously act with God as their end, as I might act so as to be united with someone I love. In SCG 3,19 he says that all things “tend to become like God” (quod omnia intendunt assimilari Deo); but he does not mean that Sweetie has pretensions to divinity. Aquinas is clear that no creature can be what God is. Or, as he says in SCG 3,20, “Creatures do not attain goodness in the same measure as it is in God, though each thing imitates divine goodness according to its measure.”4 He means that creatures can be thought of as like God, but only for particular reasons. Hence, for example, in SCG 3,21 he notes that acting creatures have causal power and exhibit goodness to different degrees. In the same chapter he says that “the effect tends to the likeness of the agent,” and “the agent makes the effect like to itself, for the effect tends toward the end to which it is directed by the agent.”5
The “big idea” in SCG 3,16–24 is indeed what McCabe presents as Aquinas’s thinking in the quotation above. When reading through these chapters you might be perplexed by some things that Aquinas says that clearly depend on cosmological views that are now outdated. In SCG 3,22, for example, he talks about “celestial bodies” and their movements in ways that no physicist would today. Again, in SCG 3,23 he refers to the motion of the heavens (motus caeli) deriving from an intellectual principle (a principio intellectivo). At the same time, however, he is maintaining that any creature that acts for an end is aiming to act in conformity with what God intends. In doing so, of course, he is not claiming that all creatures always act in conformity with God’s will. He is not, for example, denying that people can act sinfully. His point is that created agents always act for ends, and that their doing so amounts to them aiming at certain goods.
However, Aquinas evidently thinks that there is a serious difference when it comes to the actions of nonthinking things and the actions of thinking things. He holds that the actions of nonthinking things are directed to God insofar as they cannot but aim at what God, as their maker, intends them to be. But he also maintains that agents with intellect can choose to diverge from goodness that God intends for them, goodness that they aim at while operating at a purely physical and nonthinking level. Such agents, he thinks, are not merely things without intellect aiming at God as being made by God so as to conform to what God intends them to be, as is my cat. Such agents, he suggests, have an ability to turn away from what God intends even though they nonintellectually act for ends and, in doing so, tend to the goodness that is God.
In other words, Aquinas subscribes to the following theses in SCG 3,16–24: (1) nonthinking things tend to what God is as they exist and act as created by God; (2) thinking things do the same, but they do not always do so as they reflect on their actions or operations and make choices; (3) thinking things can aim or fail to aim at God because they are able to make choices. According to Aquinas, everything physical tends to God as seeking its good. But he also thinks that there are physical things (i.e., human beings) that do not always operate or act at a purely physical level. These things, he holds, can deviate from what is truly good for them.
What, however, does Aquinas take to be truly good for us? In SCG 3,25 he says that the end of everything with intellect is to understand God. My cat, Aquinas thinks, has arrived at its end, and has somehow become God-like, just by existing and acting as God intends it to act. In addition, however, Aquinas thinks that beings with intellect would be frustrated if there were something to know that they do not know. I do not mean that Aquinas supposes that I would necessarily be in a bad way if, for example, I do not know what is going on in my local supermarket as I am cooking my dinner, or if I do not always know what my friends are doing. His position is that knowers are made by God to understand, to lay hold of what is intelligible. And, since he takes God, as pure form, to be supremely intelligible, he thinks that not to have some understanding of God would be an impediment or privation in something with intellect. So he concludes that such a thing must aim at understanding God—somehow. As he says in SCG 3,25:
Each thing intends, as its ultimate end, to be united with God as closely as is possible for it. Now, a thing is more closely united with God by the fact that it attains his very substance in some manner, and this is accomplished when one knows something of the divine substance, rather than when one acquires some likeness of him. Therefore, an intellectual substance tends to divine knowledge as an ultimate end. … The more a person knows, the more is he moved by the desire to know. Hence, human natural desire tends, in the process of knowing, to some definite end. Now this can be nothing other than the most noble object of knowledge, which is God. Therefore, divine knowledge is the ultimate end of human beings.6
This ultimate end Aquinas refers to as felicity (felicitas) or happiness (beatitudo). He says: “The ultimate end of people, and of every intellectual substance, is called felicity or happiness, because this is what every intellectual substance desires as an ultimate end, and for its own sake alone. Therefore, the ultimate happiness and felicity of every intellectual substance is to know God.”7 But in what does felicity or happiness consist? This question is Aquinas’s concern in SCG 3,26–63.