Q1-4 cont'd (Q4)

OK, so the simple version for all of Question 4 would be something like this:  Everyone agree with Thomas because the alternative is a theological muddle that looks like this and this.  But of course this isn't sporting.

Question. 4 - THE PERFECTION OF GOD (THREE ARTICLES)

Article. 1 - Whether God is perfect?

This is really reducible to the act/potential distinction, again.  If we regard God as we regard a block of wood, then we say He is less perfect than a table, a chair, a bedstead made from the wood.  But it is our narrowing of the question, and our inapposite treatment of God as among the things of the universe, that leads us to err.  Realizing that a craftsman capable of realizing a table from a block of wood is more actual than wood or table, so that the craftsman in some way constitutes the block's potential and the actuality of the table, we realize that it is incorrect to conclude that actuality necessarily results from "being made" or that perfection (full actualization) must be the result of a perfecting process.

Q1-4 cont'd (Q3)

I truly do laugh every time I read the heading "Of the Simplicity of God," because in colloquial terms there is nothing remotely simple about God's "simplicity."  This is where most of us start to lose interest, and where pejorative and anachronistic uses of "scholastic" and even "obscurantist" start to be heard in mutters from the fringe.  And, honestly, as someone who spent most of my adult life convinced of a non-substantialist metaphysics (an "anti-realist" position), I'm cautious myself about wading in too confidently, here.  Wade in we should, though.  It's really interesting stuff, and turns out to be really important--every one of these questions can also be found in various debates around the time the Nicene Creed was worked out, and many of them have spawned heresies all by themselves.

Still, I really don't feel too bad about hearing Wallace Shawn's "Vizzini" voice when I read sentences like "Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality. But every body is in potentiality because the continuous, as such, is divisible to infinity; it is therefore impossible that God should be a body."  Incon-THEEV-able!

Q1-4 cont'd (Q2)

I'll have one main comment on all of Question 2, but I may interject a couple remarks on each of Articles 1-3.

It would actually be very difficult to overstate the contemporary importance of Thomas's having taken ten articles to arrive at the question of God's existence, and then taking two steps before broaching directly that question itself.  One of the luminaries in the Communio circle, albeit not wholly uncontroversial, has actually published (and, after criticism, republished in a revised second edition) a book which I found terribly helpful in the middle of my crisis of faith and literary theory:  Dieu sans l'etre:  hors-texte (God Without Being by Jean-Luc Marion).

Now, I'm not even 100% sure I still track with some of the philosophical premises that I seemed to share with Marion's approach when I read him back in 2008, but I keep meaning to re-read him to find out.  What I am sure of is that since Modernism has identified "realist" knowledge with a totalitarian vision of reality comprehended and controlled by technical means in service of an unknowable unity between the most extremely individual, inarticulate "gooey center" of each person and the most unknowably sublime "outer limits" of collective aspiration, it has become increasingly difficult to articulate what a thinker like Aquinas means by seeing revelation as God's having given us in part what He has in whole:  an identity (not a mere resemblance) between truth and reality.

Catching Up: Q1-4 (well, really Q1)

I didn't actually notice the blog was up during most of the time y'all were active, but now that you've slowed down a bit, I can jump in.  I'm going to make some comments on the Questions y'all have already gone through, to warm up a bit.

I should be able to get through Question 1 tonight (I originally planned to do Q1-4, but then I started to get verbose).