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!

Question. 3 - OF THE SIMPLICITY OF GOD (EIGHT ARTICLES)

Article. 1 - Whether God is a body?

The easy part, here is the sed contra, which just cites John's Gospel (words of Christ, even).  The hard part is everything that follows.  "Act" and "potentiality" and "continuous" bodies which are "infinitely divisible" and therefore not pure act, er, what?

OK.  At the risk of saying things everybody already knows, we have to be careful how we read "actual" and "potential," here.  In particular, we have to think of these terms as part of the universe Aristotle imagined, and that Thomas realized was pretty darn exactly like the universe God actually did put us in, and not like the universe post-Enlightenment moderns imagine, which is a sorry place where existence and significance can never coincide.  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has an exceedingly helpful and lucid discussion of act and potential, and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy very helpfully adds that "by actuality, Aristotle means both energeia, which means being-at-work, and entelechia, which means being-at-an-end."

See, Aristotle correctly realized that if there was any significance to the project of systematically understanding what is in the world and how it works--if philosophy, or any other science, or any but the most ad hoc arts, have any real purpose--then it must follow that what is real is also intelligible.  This doesn't just mean "knowable" in the reductive sense of modern epistemology.  It means that we must be able to believe (rather, to assume; it is more basic than even a presupposition) that there is a durable fitness between some way of sensing things, and the way things are; and equally a durable fitness between some prioritization of attention (some reason for inquiring), and the way things work.  The universe must not only be susceptible of being known, but it must change in ways that accord with our need to know (as systematically corrected by philosophical reflection).  That is, any project of knowing about a thing which does not consider the telos of the thing, its arc toward fulfillment of its whole plenitude of characteristic functions, will arbitrarily truncate the thing.  Of course, "we know in part," but knowing that and systematically correcting our inquiries by what we discover of the fitness of things and the purpose in their unfolding and interaction make our body of partial knowledge increasingly unmixed with error or vincible ignorance.

So in this intelligible universe (to borrow an example SEP develops out of Aristotle), we may well see a wooden table as a reduction (to just one object, a table) from a plenitude of potential (a block of wood that could become table, chair, headboard, chopping block).  But to do this is to mistakenly prioritize potential over actual, and likely to do so because of mistakenly prioritizing matter over form.  The particular matter (block of wood) does indeed "have the potential" to be any of those things, but it mostly "has" this potential insofar as there exists with the block of wood also a craftsman with the insight and skill to actualize that potential (in contemporary discourse, we often pun on "realize" to make this point).  If no such craftsman were possible in this universe, then neither would the block of wood have any real potential to be a table. And as soon as we so regard the craftsman with the block of the wood as to make the wood's potential intelligible, we see that it is the craftsman's insight and skill in actualizing that potential, in forming a table from the matter at hand, which more fully expresses the total significance of the wood's being-in-the world.

Incidentally, there is only a wall of modernist misprision, and no irreparable unfitness, between most of the observations of our better existentialist and phenomenological philosophers and the universe envisioned by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas.  As is so often the case, what we have to do is dismantle the debilitating negations of obvious truths, and the truth which has attempted to express itself in maimed and crippled form will gladly shine out.  Doing so, of course, may not salvage whole systems crippled by such negations, but it may help us understand why souls seeking truth often "suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" under those negations so long.

God, in this sense, then, must be pure actuality.  Potentiality exists only where some supervening reality is required for matter to receive its form.  A block of wood with no potential to be a table is, in our narrowed scope of observation, pure act:  it has achieved its fulness by being a block of wood.  Should our observation turn out to be too partial, and the block of wood is suddenly discovered to make a serviceable doorstop, then it will be the fault of our observation not to have seen that potential--and that potential will exist in the doorstop precisely insofar as someone with the insight and skill so to use it can at least be conceived.  But God, if God is God, cannot be thus contingent on some other's skill or insight to be actualized as God; God alone is truly self-actualized (and even that only in a figure of speech, as there is no "before God's actual being-God").

Thus God cannot be among the bodies of the universe, for all such bodies are composite, and subject to processes (like division, at a minimum) which adapt them to the purposes of others (like use in scientific examples, if no other).  God must, therefore, be precisely what/who God is, and not composed of or distributed in the universe.  And, yes, that does make the Incarnation and the Real Presence a real whiz-bang corker of a truth!

Article. 2 - Whether God is composed of matter and form?

Almost everything I can think of to say about this is already comprised in the Q3A1 comments.

Article. 3 - Whether God is the same as His essence or nature?

This one usually kinda blows my circuits, but after the last couple, I'm beginning to get on an Aristotelian-reasoning roll, here.  Right:  Nothing about the particular being "The God Who Is" is additional or accidental; there is no individualizing "this God" from the definition "a God."  Rather, everything that is actually true of God is by definition true of God.  Any possible God would be exactly this God, and would do exactly as this God has done.  Sure, from the perspective of contingent beings, historical contingencies could have unfolded in many different ways; but whatever in reason and revelation properly pertains to God qua God, does so actually and definitely, and not with regard to some definition of God that may or may not be instantiated.  We may use thought exercises of the form "could God have been otherwise than He is?"--but where the subject matter is something properly true of God qua God, such exercises are utterly futile.

Article. 4 - Whether essence and existence are the same in God?

 Again, Aquinas being more careful and systematic than I, this is wholly anticipated in my comments on Q3A3 and largely in Q3A2.  (In my defense, I think the answers to Q3A1 and Q3A2 remain mostly unintelligible to most of us non-Aristotelian thinkers until we get through at least Q3A4.)

Article. 5 - Whether God is contained in a genus?

OK, given Q3A3, this pretty much is just a matter of i-dotting and t-crossing.  What is interesting is to notice that Aquinas has correctly recruited the partiality and contingency of our knowledge of God that seemed like it might become an obstacle to scientific demonstration concerning God in Q2A1 and Q2A2 to demonstrate the priority of God's actually being-God to any possible concept or category of what-a-God-is.  The possibility of any being finding God intelligible (which does mean organizing things-known-about-God into categories, that is, fitting species to genus, instance to class) is utterly contingent on God's always already being-God.

Article. 6 - Whether in God there are any accidents?

"From all we have said," exactly.  I accidentally already said this above.

Article. 7 - Whether God is altogether simple?

Right.  All of the above, restated as a positive principle.  This roughly seems to me to re-situate Augustine's neo-Platonic assertion of God's simplicity on the safer and more expansive ground of Thomas's adaptation of Aristotle.

Article. 8 - Whether God enters into the composition of other things?

And this one, which in one sense is wholly reducible to the foregoing, is surprisingly hard to follow.  I think the reason is that Thomas here takes the presentation of Q3A1-7 as given, and branches off here to hit three misconstructions of this teaching.

Basically, if I were to word this argument in a way that seems lucid to me, I would say this:  God is exactly what God is, and has no parts.  For a thing to be made up of God-stuff plus other-stuff, it would have to get its God-stuff properties from part-of-God or all-of-God.  Now, it cannot have part-of-God, because God does not have parts.  And whatever has all-of-God is either God or God-plus.  But all-of-God is just God, who receives nothing that He does not already have from being juxtaposed with anything contingent upon God's being-God.  And to speak of God-plus would just be an admission that what we called "God" had the potential to be God-plus, in which case what we called "God" never really was the wholly actualized being properly called God (at which point we have to start over from Q2).