Q5 cont'd

So, yeah, about a week's work just went down the tubes due to a Blogger script malfunction.  This is why I code in Notepad2.  grrr.

having stalled out for a moment

I thought I'd suggest that this article is incidentally an exploration of the Thomist recognition of the goodness of being--both what it does and what it does not imply.

 Update:  This passage in another The Catholic Thing article is similarly explicit:

Yet, what does it mean to “read a book with complete impartiality”? It means that we can read the book without our protective mind interfering to prevent us from admitting the truth of what opposes what we want to do. Our society is full of a hatred rooted in envy, in the refusal to acknowledge the truth of our being. We are thus in a revolutionary situation, something similar to what Burke described in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. We have now freely chosen principles of polity that deny elements of goodness in our being. We do not bind ourselves by what is. We withhold praise from any truth that we choose not to live by.

Q5A1 & 2 -- Whether goodness differs really from being? Whether goodness is prior in idea to being?

OK, so this is actually one of those interesting questions.  The form it might take in another conversation--the one that got the generation of Ockham into all sorts of difficulties--could be something like, "Is whatever God creates, good?  Or does God choose good things to create?"  But Thomas is going to spare us the conflation of two quite different matters that lie hidden in that question, by carefully abstracting one set of differences from another.

So, then, saying something is, and is good, is not repetitive, because to the idea of actually being we now add the idea of being desireable:

a thing is desirable only in so far as it is perfect; for all desire their own perfection. But everything is perfect so far as it is actual. Therefore it is clear that a thing is perfect so far as it exists; for it is existence that makes all things actual [. . .]. Hence it is clear that goodness and being are the same really. But goodness presents the aspect of desirableness, which being does not present.  (Q5A1)

So our craftsman with the insight and skill to realize the potential table in a block of wood is only likely to make the table if he thinks the table will be desireable.