The Will and Love of God
The God who comes to us in Jesus Christ, who lifts us up beyond ourselves and moves us to salvation, the God of ecstatic self-offering, the God whose outreach of love is greater than we can think or imagine, is very strange. That, it seems to me, is a valid one-sentence summary of Thomas Aquinas’ doctrine of God. What Thomas endeavors to say in his hundreds of pages on God is really quite simple: God is uncanny. Whatever you can say or think or assert concerning God falls infinitely short of who God actually is. Indeed, the best and finally the only response to the divine power is silence, the silence of awe and reverence and hope. In a sense, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous adage, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” is applicable to Thomas’ teaching on God.1 Though he writes voluminously on the divine existence and nature, Thomas never tells us anything about God; he only tells us what God is not. And this pious silence, this reverential negativity, is, as always, in service of Aquinas’ spiritual project: to blow open the mind of his readers, to tantalize their imagination, to stir their hearts, to orient them more and more to that elusive power disclosed in Christ, that unimaginable love that alone can satisfy.
What I want to do in the course of this chapter is to follow Thomas Aquinas as he performs this dual task of naming God and directing the soul. We will consider first two of the famous “arguments” for the existence of God and see how Thomas uses them to lead his readers into a richer appreciation of the revealing God. Next, we shall look at Thomas’ presentation of the various attributes of God—simplicity, goodness, presence in the world, eternity, immutability, knowledge, will, love—and see, first, why these are proper descriptions of the God of Jesus Christ and, second, how these descriptions of the divine indirectly change the minds and hearts of his readers, moving them into a more Christlike stance of obedience and love.
The “Proofs” for God’s Existence
We approach Thomas’ arguments for God’s existence with some trepidation because they are among the most famous and talked-about texts in the history of theology. Oceans of ink have been spilled in the attempt to explain, bolster, attack, undermine, or defend these “proofs” that God exists. Interestingly, both believers and nonbelievers have defended them—and both believers and nonbelievers have denied them. For some, they provide a rational foundation for religious belief, and for others they represent the pathetic and arrogant human attempt to capture God in a net of concepts and logical necessities. For some, they furnish a purely reasonable ground for accepting the existence of God, a justification beyond all of the petty disputes of the various faith traditions, and for others they are a hopeless muddle of outmoded ideas and questionable logical moves.
It is my conviction that both the ardent defenders and the passionate critics of these proofs have, for the most part, misread them. When they are seen, by either their proponents or opponents, as the foundation upon which Thomas builds his theology, they are given an importance that they do not merit. We have seen that there is only one foundation for the theological project of Aquinas—namely, the revelatory act by which God speaks his ever-greater and ever-more-surprising love in Jesus Christ. Whatever else follows in the Summa is an elaboration and explication of that event, a showing forth in various ways of the light and power of Christ. Thomas does not begin his theology with the philosophical proofs; rather, he transforms them and then uses them according to the principle that he established in the first question of the Summa. These various ways in which philosophers have proven the existence of God are utilized by our spiritual master as manuductiones, leadings by the hand, methods by which the fallen mind is led to an appreciation of the God of revelation. More precisely, in light of Jesus Christ, they become ways of orienting the reader to the all-embracing power of God, means of showing that all aspects of one’s life ultimately find their origin and source in the divine love that Jesus disclosed.
It is very instructive that Thomas refers to the five demonstrations that he offers not as proofs but as viae, ways. As we have seen, this word via is used at the beginning of the tertia pars to designate the way to God who is Jesus Christ. They are paths that the spiritual master lays out in order to lead the reader finally to the path that alone discloses the God who is really God. It should be abundantly clear that Thomas does not formulate these arguments in the spirit of Voltaire or Descartes—that is to say, as a rationalist unconvinced of God’s existence and endeavoring to prove or disprove it to his satisfaction. The theologian who lays out these ways is someone who has already been grasped by the God of Jesus Christ, someone already on the way and now attempting to lure others onto that path.
With these remarks in mind, let us turn to that via, the argument from motion, which Thomas calls the “first and more manifest.”2 Aquinas tells us that it is certain and evident to our senses that some things in the world move. Following Aristotle, Thomas takes the term “motion” in the very broad sense of transition or change, in his words, the “reduction of something from potentiality to actuality,” from nonbeing to being.3 Whatever is in the process of changing must be in potency, but whatever causes the change must be in act, since nothing gives what it does not have. From this it follows, says Thomas, that nothing can move itself, since any self-mover would have to be potential and actual at the same time and in the same respect. To use Aquinas’ own example, the log, which is potentially hot, cannot warm itself, but must be changed by the fire that is actually hot. Nothing, finally, is autonomous in its motus (motion); all change points beyond itself to an exterior cause.
Now, if that which causes a particular change is itself being changed, it, too, must be changed by another, and that, if moved, by another again. But a chain of moved movers cannot proceed to infinity,
because then there would be no first mover, and, consequently, no other mover; seeing that subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are put in motion by the first mover; as the staff moves only because it is put in motion by the hand. Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God.4
To avoid misunderstanding, it is very important to note that this negation of an infinite series of moved movers should not be interpreted in a deist sense, as if Aquinas were demonstrating the existence of a temporally first mover at the “beginning of time.” Thomas’ demonstration says absolutely nothing, for example, about the origin of the universe, about the “big bang” theory of cosmic generation, or about the historical beginnings of the world.
What he does in fact deny is the possibility of an infinite series of moved movers in which each agent depends here and now on the influence of the agent just above it in the hierarchy. If that sort of chain were indefinite, if there were no “first” element in it, there would be no movement now, no change at the bottom of the series. The first mover to which Thomas concludes is not a distant force, in either a physical or chronological sense; on the contrary, it is a power that is here and now intimately involved in the movement of things in the world.
What coloring does this familiar and classical demonstration take on if we read it not so much as a rational starting point for Thomas’ theology, but rather as an explication of the great event of revelation in Jesus Christ? What would this proof look like if we read it as Thomas intended it, as a “leading by the hand,” a means of guiding us more surely into the mystery of God? At the outset, it seems as though we are dealing with an objective, even rather scientific, analysis of the various motions and transitions discernible in the universe. However, we must be attentive to the centrality of the theme of movement in the overall structure of the Summa, especially in the questions that inaugurate each major division. As we saw in question 1 of the prima pars, the whole point of God’s revealing activity is to move, redirect, and reorient fallen human beings, to set them on the path that leads to God. And, as was specified in the opening question of the tertia pars, the purpose of the Incarnation is to lift human beings up, to move them from a consideration of the world to a vision of the divine. And acting as a hinge between revelation and Christology is the first question of the second part, wherein Thomas explores the final end of the human person. In the brief introductory section to that question, Aquinas announces his purpose: to consider the ultimate goal of human life and “those things through which the human being can come to this end.”
In short, each major section of Thomas’ masterwork is conditioned by the problem of the movement of the human being toward God, the orientation of the sinner to salvation. One could argue that this theme of spiritual motus is the motif that dominates the whole of the Summa theologiae. Thus, it seems hardly accidental that, in the “first and more manifest” way to prove the existence of God, Thomas begins with the phenomenon of motion. What he begins with, I would argue, is what concerns him throughout the Summa—namely, the errant and correct movements of the human being. Without denying the properly cosmological dimension of the demonstration, what we see here primarily is an analysis of the spiritual “motion” toward or away from God. As always, Aquinas is endeavoring here to move people onto the path who is Jesus Christ.
If spiritual change or movement is the primary focus of this argument, then Thomas’ careful denial of self-movement in the first half of the demonstration takes on an interesting anthropological significance. In denying that something can change itself, that it can set itself on its own path, Thomas negates the sinful drive toward radical autonomy, toward self-direction. The human being who moves himself has become his own God and has simply identified the ultimate motive force with his own mind and will, his own ego. The great medieval dictum omne quod movetur, ab alio movetur (whatever is moved is moved by another) can be read in this context not so much as a principle of physics but as a piece of spiritual wisdom, urging the sinner to let go of the illusion of self-direction and to surrender to the influence of another.5 We recall that the basic dynamic of the humanity of Christ was the refusal to cling to his own mind and will and the concomitant surrender to the direction of the Other who is the Father.
But there is more to Thomas’ proof than the denial of self-movement, because there is a greater range to the sinner’s strategy. The one in rebellion against God might let go of himself, admitting that he cannot move himself, only then to surrender his life to another finite reality, to money or power or prestige, to a political party or to a charismatic leader. In terms of Thomas’ demonstration, he would then be giving the direction of his life over to a “moved mover.” Thus, what Aquinas shows in the second half of the proof is that all the motion and causal agency in the world must finally come under the influence of a mover that is outside of the web of finite things, that is not simply one more element in the chain of finite causes. In insisting on the impossibility of an infinite series of changed changers, our spiritual master compels the sinner to look, for the final direction of her life, to a power that is not simply “another being in the world,” to an authority that “moves” but that is not itself “moved.” It is only this reality that effectively lifts human beings out of self-complacency and orients them to a truly transcendent end.
It is very interesting to me that Thomas concludes his proof with the tag line: “and this [the first mover] everyone understands to be God.”6 We have seen who God is for Thomas Aquinas: the alluring, ever-greater, and transcendent power that draws us out beyond ourselves to a fulfilling and beatific vision of beauty. In identifying the “first mover” with God, Thomas reveals the essentially spiritual and mystical élan of this proof; he shows us that the demonstration has to do not so much with cosmology as with the geography of the soul.
In a sense, the spiritual dynamic of this demonstration is similar to that found in the tenth book of the Confessions of St. Augustine, wherein the saint interrogates nature, all the beauty and splendor of finite creation, in search of God. The “sea and the deeps . . . the creeping things . . . the winds that blow . . . the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars” join in unison and deny their divinity: “We are not your God; seek higher.”7 In other words, God, the ultimate good of one’s life, cannot be discovered in anything that is merely finite, anything that can be found in the world. In the more sober language of Aquinas, the soul is urged to look for God neither in himself (no self-movement) nor in the things of the world, no matter how impressive (no infinite regress of moved movers), but rather only in that power that is fundamentally transcendent, only in the unmoved mover.
There is something implied in this proof that is of great comfort to us sinners. Thomas shows that whatever is in motion is in fact always and inevitably moved by God. In terms of our spiritual reading, this means that whoever is moving toward her end, toward her happiness, is finally being lured by God, whether she knows it or not. Even if the sinner is convinced that he or some other finite power is his first mover, in point of fact, God is his first mover. Toward the beginning of the Summa, Thomas tells us that all people, in desiring to be happy, are implicitly desiring God, since God alone is our final happiness.8 To be sure, one can live under the illusion that ultimate happiness is something other than God, but the desire for happiness itself is proof that God is subtly at work in the soul of even the most hardened sinner. There is no move possible in human life that is not, in some inchoate, groping way, a move under the influence of God. In his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton describes the various paths he took that led him, it seemed, away from God.9 But from the vantage point of his later years, he saw that each of these errant journeys was in fact animated and touched by a deep hunger for the divine, and thus that God was mysteriously at work even at the least God-filled moments. Such an insight is the spiritual heart of the first “way.”
With this more soulful reading of the first proof in mind, let us turn now to the notoriously complex and puzzling third argument for God’s existence, the proof from possibility and necessity. I am convinced that this argument can come to life and speak powerfully to the spirit if we but read it as a further illumination of the revelation contained in Christ. It is worthwhile to follow the sinuous movement of this proof in order to appreciate the delicacy of the spiritual direction involved.
Thomas begins by asserting that we find things in the world that are possible to be and not to be, things that, in more technical language, are susceptible to generation and corruption.10 Again following Aristotle, Aquinas understands generation and corruption to be the two types of substantial change—that is to say, the processes by which things radically come into being and pass out of being. Thus, for example, wood is corrupted into ash and plants are generated from soil and sun. Thomas’ point is that whatever has this capacity to come into existence and pass out of existence cannot be described as necessary but only as possible.
It is at this juncture that Aquinas’ argument takes a rather curious turn. It is urged that whatever is possible, capable of being or nonbeing, “at some time is not.”11 What Thomas implies here is that the merely possible carries with it a sort of heritage of nonbeing, an irresistible tendency toward nonexistence. The merely possible is that which is constantly under the threat of falling out of being. And thus, he continues, if everything were of this type, there would be nothing in existence now, the internal “clocks” of all things having run down, the tendency toward nonbeing in all having been realized.
Therefore not all beings are merely possible, but there must exist something the existence of which is necessary. But every necessary thing either has its necessity caused by another, or not. Now it is impossible to go on to infinity in necessary things which have their necessity caused by another. . . . Therefore we
cannot but postulate the existence of some being having of itself its own necessity, and not receiving it from another. . . . And this all men speak of as God.12
Since it cannot be the case that all things are merely possible, there must exist, says Thomas, at least some being that is necessary. It is most important not to jump to the conclusion that in claiming this he has already arrived at the existence of God. All he means at this point is that there must be something in the universe that does not come into or pass out of being, something stable enough to lend a degree of stability to the ever-changing realm of possible things. For Thomas, as for Aristotle before him, planets, stars, and angels would all qualify as such necessary realities, since they are not generated or corrupted.13 These could be the final and unchanging powers that serve to anchor and renew the world over time.
Thus, at the conclusion of the first section of the proof, Aquinas has established that there are at least two levels of reality: the everyday dimension of fleeting reality and the more ethereal dimension of stable reality. But it is at this point that Thomas makes the move to the sheerly unique and mysterious being that is God. This second dimension of necessary things derives its necessity, its stability of being, from a final, ultimate cause that has its necessity from itself, that, in other words, exists through the aid or influence of no other reality. And it is this being that in turn grants stability to the whole of the universe. It is only this sheerly independent, utterly necessary reality, this power that simply is without qualification, that “all people call God.”14
Now, I realize that my reader might be wondering how this arcane and convoluted demonstration could ever qualify as spiritual direction. Once more we must keep in mind the basic attitude of Aquinas: with these proofs he is trying to guide the reader to an acceptance of the God who has spoken in Jesus Christ. With this in mind, let us open up this proof. As the first demonstration began with the theme of movement toward God, this third argument begins with a very contemporary theme: the instability and uncertainty of being, more precisely of our human being. We come into existence without being consulted—indeed, as Heidegger indicates, we are “thrown” into being.15 And we are continually haunted by the unavoidable fact of our mortality, by the inevitable onset of the substantial change that Thomas calls corruption. The conviction that we are thrown into being and will eventually be wrenched out of it persuades us that we are not self-explanatory, not self-sufficient. And this conviction is one not of the intellect alone but rather one that seeps into our blood and bones, one that frightens us and determines our actions in ways both conscious and unconscious. This mere possibility of our being is what effectively disabuses us of the illusory notion that we are our own masters, that our existence provides its own ground. Just as the first proof begins with the demonstration that we do not move or determine ourselves, so the third argument begins with the disquieting observation that we do not exist by and through ourselves. Thus, the first move in Thomas’ third way, read from the spiritual perspective, is just this decentering of the ego: the human being must look to what is other in order to find the ultimate ground and support for his existence.
However, this decentering of the ego is but a first step, and hence the demonstration continues. Having moved off of his ego, having accepted the fact of his own insufficiency, a person could spontaneously seek the support that he craves in another finite reality, in another corruptible thing. He might flee to money, to power, to material things, to the affection of another—expecting these to provide the ground for his life. It is just such a move that Thomas precludes in insisting that all corruptibles, all those things that are destined to fall into nonbeing, cannot possibly be the ultimate stabilizing force. Behind the metaphysical language, the spiritual master is urging his readers not to sink their lives into the passing things of the world.
The fleetingness and insubstantiality of the realm of generation and corruption led Thomas, as we saw, to postulate the existence of another dimension of being—namely, the necessary. Alongside of merely corruptible things, there must be some realities that have a greater stability, a greater permanence and power. In these necessary beings—be they heavenly bodies or angels or souls—one can find some anchor of stability in the swirling incertitude of finitude. However, Thomas insists that even these permanent things are not the final source and ground of the universe, since they derive their necessity from that which is necessary through itself. When read from our spiritual standpoint, this clarification is of decisive importance. In seeking the path that leads to fulfillment, a person can have made the necessary preliminary moves of decentering the ego and eschewing corruptible things and nevertheless fall into the trap of basing his life upon one of the powers that is permanent and yet less than God. In the context of our experience, many realities could be described as necessary in Thomas’ sense: ideals, political convictions, national identity, racial consciousness, heroic achievement, etc., in short, all those principles that perdure across time and that are fundamentally immune to the ravages of corruption. These great “powers and principalities” can be easily grasped as absolutes—precisely by those spiritual travelers who are relatively accomplished, who have passed beyond the first two temptations. One thinks readily of certain political revolutionaries—Robespierre, Lenin, Mao Zedong—who have transcended their narrow self-interest, who have left behind the corruptible values of wealth and sensuality, who in some ways led lives of heroic self-sacrifice, but who in the end accept as their god a political/cultural program. It is to such as these that the last section of the third proof is directed. Even the permanent things in the world, even those powers that endure across time, even those great ideals of the human condition are not the ultimate or final necessity; they are not God. Whatever good and permanence they have is derived from the sheer goodness and permanence of Being itself.
There is, if you will, a sort of triple “shaking” that happens in this proof. Seized by the God of Jesus Christ, the God of ever-greater and unsurpassable power, Thomas Aquinas wants to put his readers on the path that leads to that God. In order to enter onto the way, the disciples must first be shaken out of their own self-complacency, their tendency to cling to their egos; then they must be shaken out of their immersion in the passing things of the world; and finally they must be stirred out of their allegiance to the mighty and permanent powers that are yet less than God. Each step in the proof represents a reorienting intervention of the spiritual director, a call continually to look higher.
This theme of the contingency and danger of being human is central to the work of the great twentieth-century Protestant thinker Paul Tillich. For the German theologian, finitude itself is a condition that is always under the threat of nonbeing and finally destined to succumb to the onslaught of the powers of nonexistence.16 To be human is to live with the startling and disquieting awareness of this fact. At the heart of the spiritual quest, for Tillich, is the desire to find the “courage to be”—that is to say, to discover that ground upon which one can finally stand, that power of being that provides stability even under the threat of nonbeing.17 To my mind, this third argument of Thomas Aquinas is, in a similar way, a quest for the courage to be. Like Tillich, Thomas signals to his readers the precariousness of human existence and then orients them to the one source that can conquer the fear of being finite.
I find a connection between the sort of spiritual direction in Thomas’ third proof and that used by Jesus himself in John’s account of the woman at the well (John 4:1–42). We recall that in John’s narrative the Samaritan woman comes to the well seeking water. There she confronts Jesus, who reminds her that she has returned again and again to that well but has never been satisfied. In spiritual terms, this rhythm of drinking and becoming thirsty again is evocative of the trap of concupiscent desire. When a person seeks to fill her infinite hunger for God with something finite, something “corruptible,” she will never be satisfied and will return to the source repeatedly but each time will be more frustrated, more weary. Jesus tells the woman at the well not to seek the center of her life in the perishable and passing things of the finite realm, but rather to seek “living water,” the power of the eternal. In Thomistic terms, Jesus is drawing the woman from the corruptible to the necessary.
But, as Thomas himself implies, there is the danger that one could become fixated at the level of the necessary powers without penetrating to that which is necessary through itself—namely, God. The Samaritan woman faces the same danger. Having been lured by Christ away from the well and having acknowledged that Jesus is a prophet, she asks him whether appropriate worship takes place in the Jerusalem temple, as the Jews say, or on the holy mountain, as the Samaritans have it. She is seeking the center and orientation of her life not in the properly eternal reality of God but rather in a particular religious tradition. In terms of Thomas’ demonstration, she is wondering whether to anchor her life in one of those necessary powers, one of those great principalities that falls, nevertheless, short of God. Jesus’ answer to this question is magnificent: “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. . . . God is spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:21, 24). In other words, the divine is not a reality in this world, not something that can be caught in the categories of finitude, not “this” or “that,” but is rather spirit that transcends even those “necessary” powers that are the great religious traditions. Jesus “shakes” the Samaritan woman out of her immersion in the corruptible goods of the world and then out of her allegiance to even those noble “necessities” that are religions—in order to open her mind and heart to the uncontrollable, unlimited mystery that is God. Thomas Aquinas imitates his Master in the subtle soul work of the third argument.
Having read the first and third proofs from a more Christological and spiritual perspective, we can see that Thomas uses these demonstrations to shake and to reorient his readers. He wants to show us that none of us is our own master, and that finally, in the words of one of the Sunday Prefaces from the Roman liturgy, “in you [O God] we live and move and have our being” (cf. Acts 17:28).18 With these “ways,” Aquinas leads us by the hand to an experience of the all-embracing and all-grounding power that discloses itself in Jesus Christ. In these proofs, he shows us that in the roots of our being we are in relation to a reality that is utterly unlike the finite and contingent things of the world, that we are in the saving grasp of something stranger than we can possibly imagine.
As I hinted in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, the doctrine of God that Thomas develops in the Summa is really an anti-doctrine—that is to say, a consistent display of what God is not. Like a sculptor, Aquinas carefully carves away from our notion of God anything that smacks of the creaturely, the finite, the particular. His theology is redolent of the spirit of the Old Testament prophets who were concerned above all with overcoming the danger of idolatry. Speaking boldly from the heart of God himself, Isaiah cries out: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isa. 55:9). Similarly, Thomas Aquinas stubbornly battles the sinful tendency to draw the infinite and unsearchable power of God into the customary categories of thought. What informs the entire Thomistic analysis of God is, as always, the revelation contained in the Incarnation: the God who was capable of such an act of love must be, to use Anselm’s phrase, “that than which nothing greater can be thought.”19 It is particularly intriguing to watch the play between objections and responses in this part of the Summa. Taking the position of the sinner, the “objectors” continually try to domesticate, to finitize, the divine power, turning it into something that can be easily manipulated or avoided. With his customary calm determination, Thomas corrects each of these mistakes, heals each of these wounds of the soul.
Having explored the nature of revelation in question 1 and having shown us the various “ways” to orient the heart to God in question 2, Thomas turns in question 3 to a consideration of the divine simplicitas (simplicity). This perhaps surprising “attribute” of God is for Thomas the most highly characteristic, the most distinctive. What God’s simplicity entails, in a word, is that the divine is not any sort of being, any particular instance of being, but is rather the sheer act of existing itself. God is not this or that; God simply is. Thomas endeavors to show this simplicity through a via remotionis (a way of removing)—that is to say, through a negation of all those qualities and attributes that would make of God something like a creature.
He begins in the first two articles of question 3 by denying that God is a material body. Aquinas’ basic argument here is simple: matter is by its nature malleable, changeable, potential—and we have already seen that God is the first unmoved mover, that reality which changes the world without itself being changed. Therefore, God cannot be a body.20 On the face of it, this can seem to be a rather banal theological remark, but it takes on greater power when we set it against the backdrop of the tradition of idolatry to which we alluded above. One of the gravest temptations faced by the biblical believer was precisely this tendency to transform the ungraspable divine power into something crudely finite, to reduce one’s ultimate concern to the level of corruptible things. Interestingly, the material realm, for Thomas, is that dimension of being that can be moved or manipulated. To place God in the category of the material is thus far from a mere intellectual error; on the contrary, it is representative of a fundamentally perverse spiritual orientation: the desire to control the divine and hence to place oneself above God. Thus, in affirming that God is not a body Thomas is once more shedding light on that strange power that appeared in Christ, that revealing and saving God who cannot in principle be controlled or avoided, that power that demands of us nothing short of surrender. In a symbolic sense, all creatures must be embodied vis-à-vis the fully “spiritual” God—that is to say, malleable, passive, receptive.
It is in the fourth article of question 3 that Thomas makes one of the most important clarifications in the entire Summa, for it is in this article that he speaks of the identity of essence and existence in the God of Jesus Christ. In making this claim, Thomas states as baldly as he can the simpleness and sheer actuality of the God who has seized him. In medieval metaphysics, essence is the quidditas or “whatness” of a thing, that basic form or structure that determines what type of being something is. Existence, on the other hand, is the concrete “that-ness” of an object, the act of being by which, and because of which, a thing is. Now, in any imaginable finite reality, argues Thomas, there is a real distinction between essence and existence. This means, quite simply, that a finite being exists according to a mode or type of being. To put it more imaginatively, a limited thing is that whose act of existence is “poured” into a particular mold or structure of being that is its essence. I am not the sheer act of being; rather, I am a human being, something whose esse (act of to-be) has been “received” and “limited” by the essence principle of humanity. This real distinction between essence and being holds for the simplest microscopic particle as well as for the angel: despite the enormous difference between them, both are “beings,” not Being itself.
But God exists in a radically different manner, since he is not any type of being at all. Thomas explains:
Whatever a thing has besides its essence must be caused either by the constituent principles of that essence . . . or by some exterior agent—as heat is caused in water by fire. Therefore, if the existence of a thing differs from its essence, this existence must be caused either by some exterior agent or by its essential principles. Now it is impossible for a thing’s existence to be caused by its essential constituent principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own existence. . . . Therefore that thing, whose existence differs from its essence, must have its existence caused by another. But this cannot be true of God, because we call God the first efficient cause. Therefore it is impossible that in God His existence should differ from His essence.21
Thomas’ argument here can be stated quite simply: that in which there is a distinction between essence and existence must receive its being from something else; God does not receive his being from something else; therefore, in God there is no distinction between essence and existence. As the “first” reality, as the unsurpassable power, God is that reality that depends upon nothing outside of itself. God exists simply because it is his nature to exist. By implication, all other realities must exist in and through God, as participants in the sheer actuality of the divine. All other things in the universe are purely dependent upon the uncaused and underived nature of God; all the created universe swims, as it were, in the ocean of the divine being.
In other of his writings, Thomas makes the beautiful connection between this more philosophical statement of the way God exists and the enigmatic self-definition of God found in the book of Exodus. When Moses speaks to the burning bush, asking the name of the mysterious power that had summoned him, God responds, “I Am Who I Am” (Exod. 3:14). For Thomas Aquinas, this strange answer is, paradoxically, of stunning clarity. What God reveals is that his essence (who I am) is identical to his existence (I am). In a sense, Moses had asked a question in line with the religious sensibility typical of his time: “Which god are you?” He wanted to know the specific name of this god who had called him in order to distinguish him from the myriad other gods. God’s response implies that the true God is not one divinity among many, not one type of reality, not even the supreme being above all other things, but rather Being itself, that which is beyond any of the customary categories.
For Thomas, both the sacred name disclosed in Exodus and the description of God as the identity of essence and existence are expressions of the anti-idolatry principle. Both serve to fight off the sinful tendency to turn God into a god—that is to say, into another being with whom I may or may not be related. If God is the sheer act of being, then I must be in relation to him. If the divine existence is the air that I breathe and the environment in which I function, then I am, willy-nilly, in rapport with God. Even when running from God—as all of us sinners do to varying degrees—we are, despite our best efforts, living, moving, and having our being in him.
In his essay “The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion,” Paul Tillich says that there are traditionally two ways to think of God, two ways to encounter God.22 According to the first, we see God as fundamentally a stranger, a distant supreme being, with whom we struggle to become related. According to the second, God is met as the root and ground of our being, as the one who knows us long before we come to know him, as the one who has found us even as we begin to search for him. It is this second approach, thinks Tillich, that authentically speaks of the God disclosed in Christ Jesus. Thomas Aquinas would be in agreement with Tillich on this point. For Thomas, too, the Incarnation discloses the simple God who cannot be avoided, who cannot be set aside, “the fullness of him who fills all in all” (Eph. 1:23), and who therefore “has” us even when we want nothing to do with him. Like Tillich, Thomas wants to dismantle the mythology of a supreme being, the idolatrous view that places God and the world in opposition and competition.
In article 5 of question 3, Aquinas wonders whether God can be placed, like finite things, in a genus—that is to say, in a general category of existence.23 Given the divine simplicity, the answer is in the negative: God cannot be grouped with other things in a particular type or placed under a more general logical umbrella. The question itself is intriguing: the one who imagines that God could be somehow categorized must stand in a position superior to God. Even if one were to say, for example, that God is the highest reality in the category of beings, God would still be known and controlled by the sovereign mind of the categorizer. The theologian confidently placing God in the right logical slot would subtly but undeniably be asserting his mastery of the divine—and this is nothing but the supreme fantasy of the sinful ego. When Moses asked God for his name, he was placing himself in a similar spiritual danger. And thus God’s answer is a sort of Zen koan, a purposely puzzling and disconcerting remark designed to change the consciousness of the questioner. “I Am Who I Am” could be interpreted as a refusal to be caught in the trap of the question—and an attempt to challenge the presuppositions of the one who poses the question.
Having shown that God, in his simplicity and perfection, is unlike any created reality, Thomas endeavors in question 6 to demonstrate that God is properly described as alluring. Once more the transition is not accidental. One could admit that God is perfect and, precisely in that admission, fall out of communion with God. Since the perfect one is overwhelming, unapproachable, infinitely above the level of the creature, it would be rather easy to feel at a distance from such a reality. One could honor God as perfect but not be the least bit captivated by or drawn to that perfection. On the contrary, one could respond to it in fear or with a terrible sense of unworthiness. In question 6, Thomas attempts to overcome these dangers by showing that the very perfection of God renders him good—that is to say, attractive, compelling, fascinating.
Following Aristotle, Aquinas relates goodness to desirability: we call “good” that which attracts us, that which awakens our desire.24 But all things, Thomas tells us, want their own perfection, the full flowering of their natures.
And the perfection and form of an effect consists in a certain likeness to the agent, since every agent makes its like; and hence the agent itself is desirable and has the nature of good. For the very thing which is desirable in it is the participation of its likeness.25
What we see here with great clarity is the Thomistic theme of the return to the source. There is, he implies, a sort of mirroring dynamic between cause and effect: the former produces its likeness in the latter, and the latter sees its exemplar in the former. The cause is the fullness from which the effect has come and to which it longs to “return” through imitation or participation. Thus, a child recognizes his parents and his culture—his causes—as exemplars, ideals that he longs to emulate, sources from which he desires to drink. Desire itself, Thomas insinuates, is awakened through a contemplation of these exemplary perfections.
Therefore, since God is the first effective cause of all things, it is manifest that the aspect of good and of desirableness belong to him; and hence Dionysius attributes good to God as to the first efficient cause, saying that God is called good “as by whom all things subsist.”26
Precisely as the all-embracing and all-grounding cause of finite reality, God must be named as supremely good. He is the perfect cause from which all effects have come forth and hence the fullness of being that all effects long to imitate. Since all created being is a reflection of God, God must be the exemplar, the icon, that the created realm desires to emulate. The perfection of any finite thing’s being must be found in the pure perfection of the first and all-enveloping cause.
What I hope has emerged clearly in this argument is the dynamic character of God’s goodness. God is called good inasmuch as he enters into the minds and hearts of his rational creatures, luring them to fullness of being. The divine perfection becomes a sort of magnetic force drawing the whole of the universe out of itself. Once more, we encounter the theme of ecstasy: the divine goodness is not an attribute to be admired from a distance; rather, it is the goal that awakens love and ecstatic loss of self in the smitten creature. One is meant not to be crushed or discouraged by the sheer greatness of God but to be enlivened and perfected by it. We recall that Thomas Aquinas, when speaking of the good God, is describing the power that has appeared in Jesus Christ, the power that overwhelms the creature while allowing it to remain true to itself. It is the misconception of the sinner to suppose that God’s greatness is alienating or off-putting or even an excuse to resign oneself to one’s own mediocrity. Whenever we strive for any good, we are, consciously or unconsciously, striving to attain something of the goodness of God.
In question 8 of the first part of the Summa, Thomas addresses himself to the rather existential concern of whether God is really present in and to the world. Is the perfect, simple, and all-good God implicated in the everyday affairs of the created world, or is he a sheerly transcendent force? At this point in our discussion, we should be able to anticipate Thomas’ answer: the God whose goodness, perfection, and simplicity are disclosed supereminently in the event of the Incarnation must be a God more than capable of lurking in the world. There has obviously been an enormous amount of ink spilled on this problem of God’s relation to the universe. In my view, the subtle treatment that Thomas Aquinas gives to this problem is the foundation of a peculiarly Catholic understanding of the divine involvement in creation, an understanding profoundly rooted in the appearance of the God-human.
In the Sed contra to the first article of question 8, Thomas cites a magnificent and mysterious text from the prophet Isaiah: “Lord . . . you have accomplished all we have done” (Isa. 26:12 NABRE). Notice the beautiful tension in this line: what we indeed have done has been, nevertheless, achieved by God. We act, and God acts in us, and, in the imagination of Isaiah, there is no final contradiction between these two affirmations. This Isaian passage is a particularly clear expression of what I have called the noncompetitive relationship between God and the world. Especially in the light of the Incarnation, it becomes obvious that the proximity of God in no way overwhelms the creature but rather lifts her up to perfection and intensifies her independence and integrity. It is this paradoxical sense of the God-world relationship that Thomas Aquinas articulates in this article.
Thomas’ principal argument begins with the clear assertion that God is not in created things as “part of their essence.”27 If this were the case, created reality would simply be God, and the pantheist understanding of the God-world rapport would be correct. But Thomas is no pantheist; he is not the least bit interested in collapsing God into the world in a sort of crude identification. Such a move would compromise the being of both God and the created realm, God ceasing to be God and creation ceasing to be itself. To be sure, the pantheist option is one happily embraced by us sinners, for if God is simply identified with the world of ordinary experience, we need not leave the confines of our self-complacent finitude. If God and the world are identical, then our world need never be shaken or fundamentally questioned. Thus, Aquinas must play a more subtle game.
He next rejects the possibility that God is present to the world as an “accident”—that is to say, as a qualification or attribute of finite things. If pantheism collapses God into the world, this theory renders God even less than the world. If God were an accident of finite things, he would be altogether expendable and forgettable, something that could easily be set aside. One could express this inadequate view in a more contemporary idiom by saying that God is a force of nature that influences and animates all things or that God is a dimension of psychological life. In both cases, the divine becomes an accidental or incidental accessory to the world—once more a fantasy of the self-elevating ego.
No, God is neither identified with the world nor accidental to it; rather, God is present to it as an agent:
For an agent must be joined to that upon which it immediately acts and touch it by its power. . . . Now since God is very being by his own essence, created being must be his proper effect, as to ignite is the proper effect of fire. Now God causes this effect in things not only when they first begin to be but as long as they are preserved in being. . . . Therefore as long as a thing has being, God must be present to it according to its mode of being.28
These are among the most beautiful and remarkable words in the Summa, but again we must search behind the technical vocabulary to the spiritual experience that animates it. Following Aristotle, Thomas maintains that an efficient cause, an agent, must be spatially present to its effect. There must, for example, be a physical proximity between the staff that moves and the hand that moves it. But God, as we know, is efficient cause of the whole of the universe and in a remarkably exhaustive sense, since the divine reality produces not simply the motion, the change, the growth of the finite realm, but rather its very being, the very energy of its existence. Therefore, God, the agent cause of the whole, must be physically present at all times, to all things, in the most intimate way possible.
But being is innermost in each thing and most fundamentally inherent in all things since it is formal in respect of everything found in a thing. . . . Hence it must be that God is in all things and innermostly so [intime].29
God is not incidentally or provisionally present to the things of the world; nor is God present only to some and not to others, as some philosophies hold. No, God is in the things that he continually makes. As will be explored more fully in the next chapter, creation for Thomas is not a once-and-for-all event, something that took place “at the beginning of time.” Rather, creation is the ongoing, continual gift of being that flows from God to the world. It is the perpetual and gracious constitution of the universe through the outflowing of the divine being. Thus, the creative agent who is God must be present to, must be in all things at the very root of their existence. Thomas is echoing in more sober language Augustine’s magnificent assertion that God is interior intimo meo (closer to me than I am to myself), nearer to me than that which is nearest to me.30
As was hinted at above, this insight follows from the grounding experience of the ever-greater God in Jesus of Nazareth. As we saw in the last chapter, God enters into an unspeakably close union with Jesus without overwhelming or compromising Christ’s humanity and without negating his own divinity. In light of the Incarnation, an entirely new paradigm for the God-world relationship has emerged: what had theretofore been seen as an opposition or rivalry could now be seen as most intimate cooperation. Is God in things? Given the event of Jesus Christ, that coming together of divine and human ecstasy, we can answer that question with Thomas’ intoxicating “yes.” And notice that we need not affirm this union through an awkward collapsing of God into the world or the world into God. Once more guided by the icon of Christ, we can affirm with Thomas that the universe is fully itself precisely when it is recognized as resting most intimately in the energy of God.
The play between objections and responses in this first article of question 8 is extraordinarily rich and illuminating. The first objector offers what appears to be a pious and convincing argument against God’s presence in all things. The Psalmist, he reminds us, affirms that God is high above all nations—that is to say, radically transcendent to the world. But “what is above all things is not in all things.”31 On the face of it, this is a convincing counterargument to Thomas’ position. Does not the intimate presence of God in and to the world compromise the otherness and strangeness of God? In celebrating God’s proximity to his creation, is Thomas not stripping God of his transcendent majesty and thereby drawing him into the realm of creatures? We can hear echoes of this objection in the twentieth century in the writings of the Protestant theologian Karl Barth. Annoyed at what he took to be attempts to domesticate and control the deity, Barth cried out in favor of the Gottheit Gottes (the Godliness of God) and spoke of the “infinite qualitative distinction” between God and creation.32 Indeed, nothing raised the ire of Barth more than the peculiarly Catholic (and Thomistic) doctrine of the analogia entis (the analogy of being), the view that there is some continuity or similarity between the infinite and the finite.33
In his clarification of his position in response to this criticism, Thomas implicitly unmasks a dangerous spiritual attitude.
God is above all things by the excellence of his nature; nevertheless, he is in all things as the cause of the being of all things.34
What Aquinas signals here is that the dramatic, indeed infinite, difference between God and the world is a modal and not a spatial one. God is not transcendent to the universe inasmuch as he occupies a different “space,” but inasmuch as his way of being is qualitatively different from that of any creature. In a word, a finite thing is a being, and God is Being itself. However, this modal otherness does not for a moment imply that God is distant or far removed from creation, quite the contrary. Precisely because he is so thoroughly other, God can be in the most intimate sense (intime) the ground and cause of all things. Once more a real but subtle spiritual danger is averted. In so emphasizing the difference of God, one can easily turn the divine reality into a cold and distant idol, something akin to a Greek god or a philosophical principle. The piety of Thomas’ objector is thus unmasked as false and dangerous.
There is a similar dynamic at work in the conversation between the fourth objection and response. The objector maintains that the demons are beings but that God could not possibly be in such rebellious and essentially sinful spirits. Thus, it follows that God is not in all things.35 What we witness here is a seemingly devout attempt to preserve the beauty and dignity of God by keeping him free of contact with unsavory aspects of his creation. In this view, the perfect and transcendently simple God would never lower himself to establish a relationship with a demon. Hidden in this objection is a sort of moralizing dualism that effectively accomplishes something longed for by the sinner—namely, a safe haven, a place untouched by the divine power. If God is not in the demons, then demonic behavior is something I can embrace in order to distance myself from God. If God is not in hell, then hell is somewhere I can go to get away from God.
Thomas, the master of the soul, is carefully at work in his response.
In the demons there is their nature which is from God, and also the deformity of sin which is not from him; therefore, it is not to be absolutely conceded that God is in the demons, except with the addition, inasmuch as they are beings.36
This seems, I grant you, merely a subtle bit of medieval hairsplitting, but there is, in fact, a marvelous piece of spiritual direction here. In speaking of the demons and by extension us sinners, we must distinguish between what is true, good, and beautiful in them (their minds, their wills, their faculties, their existence) and what is evil in them (their misguided desire). Whatever pertains to being in them is good and hence grounded in the loving presence of God. In their essential structures, in their powers and in their being, they are worthwhile, beloved creatures of God and are filled up with the divine presence. What is sinful and distorted in the demons—and in us sinners—is a kind of nonbeing, a sort of shadow or darkness, an abuse of what God has given. That sin is indeed an absence of God and hence God cannot be described as being in it. But what is interesting, especially for those of us caught in the power of sin and rebellion against God, is the extent to which God is present to us even in our sin. Indeed, the very capacity to reject God rests paradoxically on the energy and power of God; even in our most dramatic rebellion, we are riding the wave of God’s unavoidable presence to us. And therefore we cannot finally avoid God in and through our sin. We cannot find refuge from the crush of the divine presence in the stance of hatred and rebellion. What this rather arcane distinction of Thomas Aquinas tells us is that we sinners can always find hope: we who flee furiously from God can never run fast enough finally to get away.
With this issue we confront one of the most contested and debated points in contemporary theology. Is it correct to say that the God of Jesus Christ, the God of passionate commitment and love, is immutable, incapable of change, indeed unresponsive? Would an insistence on this quality not undermine much of what I have been arguing throughout this book—namely, that God is properly understood only from the standpoint of the Incarnation, that fullest expression of divine compassion? And would the assertion of God’s unchangeability not imply that God is a cold and self-contained principle, a Rock of Gibraltar-like monolith of being, not truly alive and vibrant? In order to respond to these legitimate questions, it is of singular importance to understand precisely what Thomas Aquinas does and does not mean by “immutability,” and thus why he feels obliged to ascribe this attribute to the God of Jesus Christ.
As I have often urged, it is essential to examine the scriptural “icon” that governs and animates a Thomistic analysis. In the first article of question 9, which deals with the divine immutability, the Sed contra is a citation from the prophet Malachi: “I am the Lord, and I change not.” What becomes clear when we examine the biblical setting is that this divine unchangeableness is tied intimately to God’s covenant faithfulness. As is often the case in the prophetic literature, God is luring, cajoling his people, drawing them into deeper relationship with him. In the passage from Malachi that Aquinas cites, God is calling his people back to faithfulness and, as a sort of inspiration, he reminds them of his unchanging love. Indeed, in the very next verse, Yahweh says: “Return to me, and I will return to you” (Mal. 3:7). What becomes clear is that Thomas does not see a contradiction between God’s immutability and his faithful responsiveness to his people: au contraire. Rather, he appreciates the unchangeableness of God as itself the condition for the possibility of God’s everlasting fidelity.
In the Respondeo to this article, Thomas offers three arguments for the divine immutability, and I find the third the most illuminating:
Everything which is moved acquires something by its movement, and attains to what it had not attained previously. But since God is infinite, comprehending in himself all the plenitude and perfection of all being, he cannot acquire anything new, nor extend himself to anything whereto he was not extended previously. Hence movement in no way belongs to him.37
It is most instructive here to note how Thomas is defining “motion.” Motion is understood as the attainment or acquisition of some dimension of being previously unattained—the coming into possession of that which one lacked. It is precisely this type of motion that must be denied of God who is the supremely simple, perfect reality. The one who is the fullness of actuality cannot realize some new dimension of himself, cannot grow into a deeper or richer mode of existence, cannot “get better.” Indeed, were God to move in this sense he could not possibly be that all-embracing, transcendent reality that draws the universe up out of itself in ecstasy, since God himself would be drawn by something even greater. In a word, what Thomas denies of God is the changeableness characteristic of creatures—that is to say, a development from nonbeing to being.
But I would argue that this denial by no means implies that other types of movement cannot be ascribed to God—namely, those changes that entail not imperfection but perfection, fullness of being. For example, the ability to enter profoundly into the thoughts and feelings of another, the capacity to respond to the needs of another—what we might term “compassion”—is not to be denied of the immutable God. Rather, as a perfection, it should be vigorously affirmed of him. Similarly, the mutability involved in a beautiful song or an elaborate dance, the changeableness of a lively and vivacious personality—such perfections are ascribable to the unchanging God of Thomas Aquinas. To return to our earlier example, the God who “cannot get any better” is utterly unlike the Rock of Gibraltar, which is a being at an extremely primitive level of existence. No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock. He must be what Nicholas of Cusa called a coincidentia oppositorum (a coming together of opposites), a blending of qualities that seem mutually exclusive in creatures.38 In the words of the mystical theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, God must be both great and small, both changing and unchanging, both high and low.39 That which cannot improve must already have, in an eminent degree, all that we recognize as perfection, beauty, and truth in the created realm. Therefore, the immutable God, defended by Thomas, is no Aristotelian principle, no uncaring force, but indeed is the God disclosed in Jesus Christ as ungraspable perfection.
And once more, in making this clarification, Aquinas holds off a dangerous spiritual attitude. In claiming that God changes (in Thomas’ sense of “change”), the sinner would imply that the divine reality stands in need of improvement and thus exists at the level of any finite thing. Such a being—even praised as the highest and most impressive of realities—would remain but a creature, one more finite reality striving for perfection. Were God changeable, there would be not a qualitative but merely a quantitative difference between God and the realm of creatures. And if this were the case, then God could not possibly lure creatures dramatically beyond themselves to an infinite and perfect fulfillment.
And it is precisely the sinner who wants to flee from the demands of such a call, who wishes to remain within the narrow confines of his creaturely existence and thus who finally feels compelled to affirm the changeableness of God. Once more we see the basic strategy of the rebel: turn the infinite God into something resembling a creature so as to rest comfortably in creaturely complacency. Thomas Aquinas defends the immutability of God because of the salvation he has experienced in Jesus Christ, because he has been invited by the God of Jesus to an ecstatic perfection beyond creatureliness.
In question 10, article 2, of the Summa, Thomas considers an attribute that most would readily ascribe to God—namely, eternity. However, in the course of the discussion, Aquinas makes some key distinctions and clarifications that help to specify what the theologian means by eternity and therefore why, precisely from a spiritual standpoint, he feels obliged to affirm this quality of God.
In the Respondeo, Aquinas makes the connection between immutability and eternity. Following Aristotle, he argues that time is the measure of motion or succession. “Before” and “after” are terms designating, indeed measuring, some transition or movement in nature. But God, as we have seen, is utterly beyond movement and hence cannot be measured by any temporal category.40 For an immutable reality, there can be no “before,” “during,” or “after”; rather, all his being must be expressed, paradoxically, in a nunc stans, an eternal now.
What we notice first of all in this Thomistic analysis is that God’s eternity has nothing to do with everlasting duration. It is decidedly not the case that God is a being who exists in endless time, who simply endures across centuries and aeons without passing away. It is not the case that some things last a brief time, others a long time, and God an infinitely long time. What Thomas argues is this: God is not in time at all; God is not long-lasting or short-lasting, neither fragile nor durable. Rather, the very categories of time do not apply to God because God is not one of the realities in the world whose movement or transition can be measured. We see once again the theme of the divine strangeness. If we were to picture one of the temporal beings in our experience and simply imagine it enduring for an infinite period of time, we could hold in our minds an idea of the everlasting God. But the properly eternal God, the God who cannot be captured in the categories of temporality at all, is literally unimaginable, inconceivable. Thomas here sculpts away one more creaturely quality from our conception of God in order to render the power disclosed in Jesus Christ ever more mysterious and alluring.
How is Thomas the spiritual master at work in this article? One of the greatest temptations of the sinner is to escape from God by isolating him temporally. Even under the guise of piety, one could affirm that God is a power at work “at the beginning of time.” Or, in a similarly devout vein, one could say that God is the magnet luring the universe into the future. Such a sequestering of the first reality renders him effectively impotent in the here and now of one’s life. When I speak in the language of mythology and say that the divine was especially active in illo tempore (in that time), in that sacred moment “in the beginning,” I thereby distance myself from God, happily “secularizing” the time in which I live. Or, when I simply wait for God to be revealed in that marvelous eschatological “end time,” I similarly sweep the divine presence from the time that concerns me now. In affirming, however paradoxically, the divine eternity, Thomas holds off these sinful states of mind. The God who is outside of time, over time, is present to every moment of time. What we call “past, present, and future” are simultaneously “present” to God and hence all “times” are sacred, touched by the divine power. Just as there is no place where one can fly to be away from God (after all, God is everywhere), so there is no time when one can be free of God. Thomas, in one more way, pushes out the contours of God, hints at the depth, breadth, and length of God, in order to cut off all sinful modes of escape.
The sinful uneasiness with the divine eternity is clearly brought out in the play between objections and responses in article 3, which considers the question of whether to be eternal belongs to God alone. The second objector formulates a clever argument in which he tries to establish a sort of rival eternity to that of God. In Jesus’ parable recounted in Matthew 25, the divine judge speaks to the damned saying, “Depart you cursed into the eternal fire,” thus implying that the evil eternity of hell must be affirmed alongside the eternity of God.41 Can we hear the subtle voice of the sinner in this objection? Can we sense here the perverse desire to find freedom from the demands of God precisely in the rebellion of sin itself? Is there not here an attempt to mock the eternity of God with the equivalent eternity of hell or rejection of God? Just as in the previous question an objector denied that God could be in a demon, so here the objector argues that God’s eternity cannot overwhelm and include the eternity of hell.
In response, Aquinas says,
The fire of hell is called eternal, only because it never ends. Still, there is change in the pains of the lost. . . . Hence in hell true eternity does not exist, but rather time.42
Again, the distinction is made between what is authentically eternal and what is merely everlasting. In this case of rebellion against God, we are dealing with that which is, in a sense, furthest from eternity, that which is most ensconced in and conditioned by time. Indeed, one could say that one of the greatest sufferings of hell is precisely the inability to lose oneself in the timelessness of God, to be sunk, as it were, hopelessly in time. To be in hell is not to find a rival eternity; rather, it is to be cut off from the bliss of transcending time.
In the end, the affirmation of God’s eternity means that we have a way out of the physical and psycho-spiritual ravages of time. To be sure, time eventually wears out our bodies, aging us, pushing us toward decline, but it also wears us out spiritually and psychologically by robbing us continually of the present moment. Because we exist in time, we can never finally rest in the beauty of our experience. Instead, the present slips inevitably and irredeemably into the past, leaving us with only memories and impressions. To be one with the eternal God is not to intensify our sense of time (in everlastingness); on the contrary, it is to be raised up to that rapturous state of nunc stans, the eternal present, in which all events, all experiences, are wonderfully “now.” In those rare moments that we appropriately refer to as “ecstatic,” we lose a sense of time, a feeling of past, present, and future. In those moments, we and the world that surrounds us simply are.
Those ecstasies—and not, for example, the agonies of waiting endlessly in line—are proper anticipations, foretastes, of what it means to be united to the God who is eternal in Thomas’ sense of the term.
We have walked with Thomas Aquinas as he has negatively delineated and described the power that was disclosed in Jesus Christ. Not caught in any of the categories of finitude, this reality is simple, perfect, alluring, intimately present to all things, unchanging, and eternal. As such, this power draws us up beyond ourselves into a kind of ecstatic encounter. But some nagging questions remain. Is this strange and alluring reality personal? Does it or she or he know me, love me, care about me? To this point in the discussion we could be dealing with a still rather abstract and coldly impersonal force. Is this God that Thomas Aquinas speaks of friendly?
In question 14 of the Summa, Thomas begins to address these concerns by exploring various issues dealing with the knowledge of God. As we follow Thomas’ discussion here it is most important to remind ourselves of a clarification made in chapter 1. When a medieval theologian speaks of knowledge, he refers not to a distant, academically respectable form of rational insight. Rather, he speaks of experience and personal participation. When Thomas wonders, therefore, whether God has knowledge, he wants to know to what extent God experiences himself and the world that he has made.
Let us turn now to the first article of question 14, in which our issue is explicitly raised. In the Sed contra, Thomas cites the magnificent passage from Paul: “O the depth of the riches of the wisdom and of the knowledge of God!” (Rom. 11:33). It is important to note the context for this citation: Paul sings of the depths of God’s wisdom precisely to counter the egotistical tendency of human beings to stand above God. What immediately follows the above citation is these words: “For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been his counselor?” (Rom. 11:34). The implication is that to deny knowledge of God is subtly to assert one’s superiority to the divine.
The actual argument for God’s knowledge in the Respondeo is elegant and beautiful. Thomas tells us that an intelligent being is distinguished from a nonintelligent thing by the difference in the range of their being. A rock, for example, possesses but one form—namely, its own: a rock is a rock. But a human being, possessed of an intelligent mind, can, through that intelligence, assume the forms of many things beyond itself. Indeed, in Thomas’ phrase, the mind is quodammodo omnia (in a certain sense, all things); it is a sort of theater in which a full range of “forms” can appear.43 What gives the human subject this capacity to be all things is the immateriality of the mind. Because human beings are at root spiritual or immaterial, they can reach beyond the confines of their own nature.
Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality. . . it follows that he occupies the highest place in knowledge.44
As spiritual in the richest possible sense, God is that reality that can enter, in a supremely affective and personal sense, into another, knowing it from within. God is able to reflect on—to possess—not only his own being but the being of all that he has created. He concerns, presses on, understands, consciously holds all possible expressions of reality. What Thomas specifies here is the precise nature of the divine presence “in” things that he spoke of earlier: God is present to all things not only ontologically but personally, knowing them, in Augustine’s magnificent phrase, better than they know themselves. We notice something remarkable here: God’s spirituality or immateriality does not imply God’s distance from the world; on the contrary, it is precisely this quality of the divine being that enables God to be absolutely intimate and “interior” to his creation. Because God is immaterial, God can “become” one of his creatures, living in the depths of its being, luring it from within.
And is this not the divine power disclosed in Jesus Christ? The reality that ultimately concerns us and lifts us up beyond ourselves must be a person who knows us; if God were less than knowledgeable, we could justifiably assert our superiority to God and leave him behind. We cannot finally be “had” by a blind cosmic force; we cannot finally be compelled by an impersonal ground of being. No, says Thomas Aquinas, the ground of being must be a person who sees me, knows me, and searches me out.
In the fifth article of this fourteenth question, Thomas most explicitly discusses the way that God knows the world, and his findings are of decisive spiritual significance. Following Aristotle, Aquinas admits that the first object of God’s knowledge is God’s own being: God is, as it were, intuitively and perfectly aware of himself. Then his argument continues:
Now if anything is perfectly known, it follows of necessity that its power is perfectly known. But the power of anything can be perfectly known only by knowing to what its power extends. Since therefore the divine power extends to other things by the very fact that it is the first effective cause of all things, . . . God must necessarily know things other than himself.45
In short, God grasps his own reality and then understands all that he has made inasmuch as it participates in him. In reflecting on himself, God at the same time reflects upon all that he continually touches with his presence. For Thomas, God sees the universe in and through himself, through the prism of the divine being. What is wonderful here is the spiritual truth: God sees things properly, in their deepest identity, in their rootedness in the divine. God appreciates the universe not as a separate and independent realm of reality but precisely as an outpouring from his own love. One of the ways that we could describe the fallen mind—the mind characterized by sin—is a tendency to lose this vision of the world, to see the universe outside of its divine aura and separate from its divine ground. It is, for instance, a mind marked by an excessive empiricism and materialism that stubbornly misses the deepest truth about the created realm, that arrogantly brackets the spiritual dimension as something unworthy of serious attention. Or it is a mind exclusively attuned to the movements and affairs of the finite that cannot see the infinite lurking everywhere or cannot appreciate the divine soil out of which all created existence grows. To know the world properly, Thomas implies, is to see it with the eyes of God—that is to say, to see it only through the “veil” of God’s being.
The play between the second objection to this article and its response is most interesting inasmuch as it displays once more the false piety of the sinner. In line with classical epistemology, the objector argues that the object known is the perfection of the knower. Thus, if God knows something other than himself—namely, the world—then that object will bring God to greater perfection and will be, in some sense, nobler than God.46 As is usually the case with Thomas’ objections, there is great common sense here. Whatever I know in some way stands outside of me, presses itself upon me, and brings my mind to reverence and obedience. To know something is, in a word, to acknowledge one’s indebtedness to that thing. But this seems to be impossible to the perfect and self-sufficient God, and hence God cannot know the world. Piously defending the independence and perfection of God, the objector effectively drives God out of the world of created things. And once more the fantasy of the sinful ego is realized: a universe free of a prying, knowing God who sees our actions and peers deeply into our minds and hearts.
In response, Aquinas then highlights the priority of images in the divine mind. The image of a stone, for instance, perfects the created mind by bringing it to greater actuality, but, says Thomas, the images of created things are in the divine mind “before” the created things themselves, acting indeed as their archetypes.47 Thus, God’s knowledge of the world does not perfect God; it does not bring to God something God did not already have. Rather, God’s knowledge is what perfects the world. This last point is central: God does not stand outside of the world, deriving knowledge from it; on the contrary, the world derives its being from the knowledge of it that God continually pours into it. God does not know the world because the world exists; the world exists because God knows it.
We notice again the subtle spiritual direction at work here. No creature must ever think that God’s mind is dependent upon him; no finite reality should ever see itself as in a position to manipulate God. Rather, all creatures are dependent upon, and beholden to, the divine knowing by which they exist. Once more we are being urged to humble ourselves before the ever-greater power disclosed in Christ. More specifically, we are encouraged to become a sheer transparence to the divine knowing that flows through us.
This clarification is especially helpful given the terrible consequences that follow from the dominance of the mind. The mind is one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the self-elevating ego. The mind is frequently used by the sinner as an aggressive tool to dominate, take apart, analyze, and finally manipulate the world in which he moves: all must come into the purview of the controlling intelligence. And, unfortunately, God does not escape the grasp of the manipulative mind. God becomes all too frequently one more object for the sinful ego to master and “know.” In his discussion of the knowledge of God, Thomas Aquinas consistently challenges this pretension of the domineering intelligence. We are in proper relationship with God when we see ourselves and our world as God sees them—or better, when we allow ourselves to be known by the infinite power that continually creates us. Once more, the God of Jesus Christ invites the reversal that is ecstasy.
In affirming intelligence of God, Thomas Aquinas fundamentally proves that the first and perfect reality is a person, a “someone” possessed of consciousness. But is this person simply an abstract and distant knower, or is he characterized by concern and by love? In some ways, this is the most elemental and gripping theological question: Does the ground of being, the source of all that is, give himself to me in love? And do I therefore finally have the courage to be? Is there ultimately a loving foundation for my life despite all of its pain and setbacks and disappointments? Does God’s will reach out to me in providential concern? These questions are broached in question 19 of the Summa theologiae.
In the first article of question 19, Aquinas shows that God’s will follows necessarily from his intellect. When an intelligent nature understands the good as good, it automatically either pursues it or rests in it. And both pursuing and enjoying are acts of the will. Now, inasmuch as God understands himself as good, he necessarily rests or rejoices in the good that he assuredly is, and this divine joyfulness is identical to the divine will.
And so there must be will in God, since there is intellect in him. And as his intellect is his own existence, so is his will.48
Thomas implies here that God’s being is characterized by celebration and joy. To be God is to rest in, to savor, the good. In language that should be familiar to us by now, the divine being, marked by will, is nothing but ecstasy, a constant act of finding pleasure in the good possessed. What does God do then? A completely valid and theologically accurate response would be that God enjoys himself, loving and delighting in what he has.49
Once it is affirmed in no uncertain terms the satisfaction that God finds in resting in the perfection of his own being, it becomes rather difficult to understand why God would ever will anything outside of himself. We saw in the last question dealing with the divine intellect that God knows all those things that share in his being; but does he will them, could he possibly care about them, lost as he is in the wonder of his own reality? Wouldn’t the God of infinite self-satisfaction be, necessarily, narcissistic? Obviously, such divine narcissism would be, once more, the fantasy of the rebellious ego: a God so wrapped up in himself that he is utterly indifferent to the being and activity of his creation. Thomas’ analysis of God’s capacity to will what is other is his attempt to correct this sickness of the soul.
Thomas’ argument is one of the clearest and most passionate presentations of the divine ecstasy that can be found in his work:
For natural things have a natural inclination not only toward their own proper good, to acquire it if not possessed, and, if possessed, to rest therein; but also to spread abroad their own good amongst others, so far as possible. . . . It pertains, therefore, to the nature of the will to communicate as far as possible to others the good possessed; and especially does this pertain to the divine will, from which all perfection is derived in some kind of likeness.50
God cannot contain himself. Just as someone who is in a festive mood cannot help but bubble over in love and good cheer, so God cannot hold himself in, cannot refrain from sharing his good feeling with another. In one sense, Thomas implies here that God cannot finally rest in the goodness that he possesses; rather, his joyful will jumps about, spills over, overflows. God wills others in order to allow them to share in the ecstasy that he has.
Thus, the grounding and sustaining source of all that is, the perfect and unchanging one, is a person endowed with mind and will and therefore someone who cajoles and draws the created universe to himself. Thomas gives greatest specification to this idea in question 20 of the Summa, where he speaks of the love of God. If, as we have argued, Aquinas’ work is indeed a reflection upon the revelation of God in Jesus Christ, then this quaestio represents a sort of climax of the theological enterprise, for here we come to the description of God that is central to the New Testament witness. What appears in the life, death, and Resurrection of Christ is, for St. John the Evangelist, the stunning fact that God is love. Let us follow St. Thomas Aquinas as he attempts to articulate the same insight.
In the first article of question 20, Thomas spells out the nature of love as the “first movement of the will.”51 Love is the will’s basic affection for the good, whether possessed or not. When someone has the good, he loves it as something he delights in, and when someone lacks the good, he loves it as something he hopes for. In either case, love is the elemental and grounding force, the deepest “personality” and energy of the will. Even when the will turns against an evil, it does so out of more primordial love for some other good.
Hence in whomsoever there is will and appetite, there must also be love, since if the first is wanting, all that follows is also wanting. Now it has been shown that will is in God, and hence we must attribute love to him.52
God is fundamentally a passion, an energy, an activity. Once more we can see that Thomas’ insistence on God’s immutability and perfection in no way involves a denial of God’s liveliness. It is none other than the perfectly realized ground of all there is who is a great wave of love.
Now, it should be clear that in making this claim Thomas’ spiritual direction is eminently at work. It is obviously the sinner, resistant to the lure and attraction of God, who would happily imagine that God is devoid of love. Were God not loving, the sinner could go about her business in self-absorption and self-elevation without fear of divine intervention or interference. However, a God who is love, we all realize in the depths of our hearts, is a God who will not leave us alone in our sin, a God who will bother us and prompt us and push us to transformation. Not only is God endowed with the personalizing qualities of intellect and will; God is, above all, possessed of a driving passion toward the world that he has made, especially toward those rational creatures whom he wants to elevate to a share in his own life. This love appears wondrous to those on the path of life and fearsome to those who are clinging to themselves in rebellion against God. Thomas, the master of the soul, stubbornly preaches this beautiful and harsh truth about the God who will not let go of us. And again, where does he derive this insight finally but from the experience of unsurpassable love that was disclosed to him in Jesus Christ: there is nothing greater than that God becomes human; there is no love more profound than this gift of divine condescension.
In the exchange between the first objection and response in this article, Thomas makes an important clarification with regard to the nature of the divine love, which holds off a very subtle ruse of the sinful soul. The objector argues that since love is a passion and since there are no passions in the immutable God, it follows that God cannot be characterized by love.53 Clinging to the unchangeability of the divine, the objector wants to turn God into someone distant and indifferent, too cold to be possessed of a passion as “warm” as love. Thomas’ answer is illuminating. In us, who are composed of mind and body, the movements of the spirit are always accompanied by corresponding passions in the body: moods, emotions, feelings, etc. But God is not a composition of spirit and matter and hence in God there can exist powerful urges and movements of the will—attraction, desire, compassion, love—which do not entail the corresponding bodily movements that we generally refer to as passions.54
This clarification is of great contemporary relevance. On the one hand, Thomas corrects the objector’s assertion that God’s incorporeality precludes God’s love for the world, and, on the other hand, he anticipates the danger of identifying the divine love with passion in the ordinary sense of the term. It would indeed be a fantasy of the sinful ego to identify God’s love with a sort of feeling or passion of the body, since, by their very nature, passions are fleeting, unreliable, and manipulable. Were the divine love something analogous to a bodily passion, it would come and go, fluctuating according to mood and whim. And it would also be subject to enormous manipulation and control on the part of the sinner. We all know from direct experience how our passions can be skillfully and sometimes painfully manipulated by another: they can be turned off or turned on, intensified or relaxed, heated up or cooled down all by the words and behavior of those around us. Were God’s love like an emotion, the sinner could toy with it, now awakening it, now dampening it, now delighting it, now frustrating it.
In this exchange, Thomas Aquinas insists that the divine love that comes to us in Christ Jesus, which is identical to the divine being itself, which creates and holds up the universe, is nothing as insubstantial, fleeting, and unpredictable as a bodily passion or emotion. Rather, it is the rock upon which the world is based and the sure foundation upon which sinners can confidently rebuild their lives. At the same time, this non-emotional love is not the least bit cold. As we have seen, it is the heart and soul of God, the great act by which God goes out of himself in ecstasy to share his joy with his creatures. By walking this middle ground and making some key linguistic clarifications, Aquinas guides the sinner into right relationship with the divine love.