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De Artifice Divino: A Thomistic Account
of God’s Creative Act
A Master’s Thesis
submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Philosophy
Holy Apostles College and Seminary
Cromwell, Connecticut
By
Dwight R. Stanislaw
Spring 2019
Thesis Advisor,
Dr. Timothy L. Smith
Reader,
Dr. J. Marianne Siegmund
© 2019
All Rights Reserved
De Artifice Divino: A Thomistic Account
of God’s Creative Act
A Master’s Thesis
submitted in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts in Philosophy
Holy Apostles College and Seminary
Cromwell, Connecticut
By
Dwight R. Stanislaw
Spring 2019
Approved by:
__________________________________________________, Thesis Advisor
Timothy L. Smith, Ph.D.
__________________________________________________, Thesis Reader
J. Marianne Siegmund, S.T.D.
__________________________________________________
Date
Table of Contents
I. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..1
II. Chapter One: The Knowledge of God…………………………………………………………2
III. Chapter Two: God’s Willing of Creation…...……………………………………………….31
IV. Chapter Three: The Relation Between God and Creation…………………………………...51
V. Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………..…..64
VI. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………66
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In Book I of his Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us that it is because of their wonder that men
first began to philosophize. The following thesis is an affirmation of this self-evident truth, and
much assistance was provided to me in bringing it to fruition by a great number of people,
several of whom I would here like to thank. First, my professors at Holy Apostles College and
Seminary for their contribution to what has been the greatest two years of study and intellectual
development I have experienced in academic life, specifically as cultivated by Dr. Robert
Delfino, Dr. Curtis Hancock, and Dr. Randall Colton. I would also like to thank HACS alumni,
Jonathan Stute and Christopher Apodaca, for their countless insights and friendship during the
program.
Where the present work is concerned, I owe my sincere thanks to Dr. Gaven Kerr who
regularly provided a wealth of knowledge and resources on the topic at hand, and who readily
served as a sounding board for my ideas as they began to take shape during the preliminary
stages. Additionally, I would like to thank Dr. James T. Turner, Jr. who, since serving as my first
philosophy professor six years ago, helped refine my thoughts throughout this project and who
remains a consistent source of guidance and encouragement, all of which contributing to my
improvement as a philosopher. Finally, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my professor and
thesis advisor, Dr. Timothy L. Smith, for his dedication serving in this capacity and to the
process of moving me to think more clearly, articulate my positions thoroughly, and to pursue
excellence in every detail of the work itself as a reflection of proper philosophical investigation.
I would especially like to thank my family and friends for their constant backing during
this monumental, time-consuming undertaking. In particular, for the love, patience, and
unwavering support of my wife, Megan, without whom none of this would have been possible.
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Introduction
Beginning his treatise on creation, Thomas Aquinas writes, “It must be said that every
being in any way existing is from God.”1 Here, as it concerns the study and theoretical
development of metaphysics and philosophical theology, the rich and fertile ground upon which
meticulous cultivation may yet yield a considerable amount of encouraging results is that of God
and his act of creation. It is with this optimism in mind that the current project is undertaken. In
what follows, the aim is to articulate, develop, and defend a Thomistic metaphysical account of
God’s creative act with respect to its three most essential elements, namely God’s knowledge,
will, and relation to the created world. As such, the body of the thesis will be divided into the
following three chapters, each with relevant subsections: (1) The Knowledge of God; (2) God’s
Willing of Creation; and (3) The Relation Between God and Creation.
Prior to proceeding, and to better facilitate proper expectations, I offer the following
preambulatory statements. First, Thomistic is used purposely in that while the objective is to
employ Aquinas as the steadfast guide for the work itself, a significant number of Classical
Theist and Thomist philosophers and theologians will be consulted as well for further elucidation
and to substantiate the views proposed herein. Second, while attention will be given at the
conclusion of each chapter to some of the more pressing or popular objections to the views as
stated, the work is primarily intended to serve as a positive Thomistic account and not a lengthy
and thorough defense against its opponents. Finally, the ultimate end of the work is to answer
definitively the question of unity and coherence, arguing for the eminently superior nature of the
Thomistic account insofar as its metaphysical positions and their corollaries form a
comprehensive system preferable among all others.
1 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, q. 44, a. 1, at DHS Priory, www.dhspriory.org/thomas/.
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CHAPTER ONE: THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD
It is perhaps unsurprising that theist philosophers, particularly within the catholic
tradition, have overwhelmingly held that God possesses knowledge, and this due to a nature that
includes, among other attributes, intelligence. Also unsurprising are the myriad attempts
providing explanations with respect to the way God’s knowledge is to be understood as regards
both the how and the what qualifications to the question, Does God know? As such, this chapter
will begin with a general treatment of Aquinas’s affirmation that God possesses knowledge and
subsequently illumine the following three features thereof: (1) God’s mode of knowing; (2)
God’s knowledge as the cause of things; and (3) God’s knowledge as fully divisible into two
sufficient categories. Because God’s knowledge serves as the bedrock of the entire metaphysical
framework, this chapter provides a more comprehensive distillation than the subsequent two and
an extended exposition.
When directing his attention to the question of whether God has knowledge, Thomas, like
those before him, answers affirmatively. In considering what is primarily responsible for this
conclusion, Aquinas is particularly adamant on tying together the notion of God’s knowledge
with his immateriality. Thus, Aquinas says,
Therefore it is clear that the immateriality of a thing is the reason why it is
cognitive; and according to the mode of immateriality is the mode of
knowledge…Since therefore God is in the highest degree of immateriality…it
follows that He occupies the highest place in knowledge.2
The idea that immateriality grounds cognitive processes, and that the mode of knowledge a thing
has follows upon its mode of immateriality, is the result of argumentation that the intellect
itself—and this with respect to any intellect, whether human, angelic, or the divine—must be
2 ST, I, q. 14, a. 1.
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immaterial to properly perform its function of knowing things in their natures absolutely and
universally.3
Having previously established that God is wholly simple and thus without composition of
any kind,4 Aquinas concludes that God is immaterial in the highest degree and that from this he
possesses knowledge in the highest degree; what is typically termed omniscience. More formally,
we might construct his position as follows:
(1) Intellects possesses knowledge proportionate to their mode of immateriality.
(2) God is eminently immaterial.
(3) Therefore, God possesses perfect knowledge.
Premise one finds support in that where intellects are concerned, knowledge is dependent upon
material conditions, composition, and modes of existence. For example, while the intellect of
man’s rational soul potentially knows all things, it is confined in its operation inasmuch as the
soul is the substantial form of a material body and is therefore dependent upon the senses and
sensible bodies for its mediated knowledge, in addition to its temporal and hyper-transitive
existence in this condition. Providing complementary sentiments is Davies: “On his [Aquinas’s]
account, knowledge is nothing but liberation from materiality, and liberation from materiality is
nothing but knowledge…Knowledge, he says, must be ascribed to God since God is wholly
immaterial.”5
3 See, e.g. ST, I, q. 75, a. 5; Thomas Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia, c. 4; James Ross, Thought and
World: The Hidden Necessities (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008), c. 6; Gyula
Klima, “Aquinas’s Proofs of the Immateriality of the Intellect from the Universality of Human Thought,”
Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics 1 (2001), 19-28; and Edward Feser,
“Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought,” in Neo-Scholastic Essays (South Bend, IN: St.
Augustine’s Press, 2015), 217-253. 4 ST, I, q. 3, arts 1-8. 5 Brian Davies, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 191.
4
Similarly, even though “angels have no bodies naturally joined to them,”6 their
knowledge is mediated as well given that the intelligible species of things apprehended are
provided to them by God as from something outside of itself.7 Thus, angelic knowledge is
perfected insofar as the intelligible species are received connaturally from God together with
their immateriality. Angels, while immaterial by nature, are still composed of form and existence
(esse) as potency to act, and their immateriality varies by degree following from the determinate
grade of actuality it possesses. On Aquinas’s view, Wippel notes, “…one such substance will
agree with another in being immaterial, but it will differ from another in its degree of perfection
according to the extent that it recedes from potentiality and approaches pure act.”8 For Aquinas,
then, even as angels are by nature immaterial in varying degrees, they do not possess knowledge
perfectly because of their reliance on the multiplicity of forms or intelligible species that must be
received. Commenting on this, Aquinas writes,
Now in God the whole plenitude of intellectual knowledge is contained in one
thing, that is to say, in the Divine essence, by which God knows all things. This
plenitude of knowledge is found in created intellects in a lower manner, and less
simply. Consequently it is necessary for the lower intelligences to know by many
forms what God knows by one, and by so many forms the more according as the
intellect is lower.9
Premise two, meanwhile, is relatively uncontroversial, at least with respect to theism
classically conceived, and thus the conclusion follows therefrom. Garrigou-Lagrange notes
concisely,
Immateriality is the root of knowledge. The more immaterial a being is, the more
capable it is of knowing. Now God is altogether immaterial, because He
6 ST, I, q. 54, a. 5. 7 ST, I, q. 55, a. 2. 8 John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated
Being (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 91. 9 ST, I, q. 55, a. 3.
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transcends the limits, not of matter merely, but even of essence, since He is
infinite in perfection. Hence He is transcendently intelligent.10
What we see Aquinas driving at when articulating how God possesses knowledge is the idea that
because knowledge is tied directly to immateriality, and because God is essentially immaterial,
entirely uncomposed, and dependent on nothing extrinsic to himself, the result is that God
possesses knowledge in the most perfect and unlimited way possible. Seeing that for Aquinas
knowledge and immateriality are intimately interconnected, and that human and angelic intellects
are inhibited in their ability to know given the composite constitution of both—the former with a
material principle and the latter with a principle of existence—there remains the inquiry as to
how God knows and what God knows, respectively.
God’s Mode of Knowing
Regarding the question, How does God know?, two answers are given that are both
integral to a comprehensive view, one addressing the method and means of God’s knowledge,
and the other the mode in which this knowledge is possessed. Beginning with the former, the
method and means, Aquinas states firmly, “God understands Himself through Himself.”11 The
line of argumentation for such a position runs as follows. To begin with, every act of
understanding is an immanent activity of the agent that remains within the agent himself, that is,
something that takes place intrinsically and is perfective of the agent in some sense. In contrast,
transeunt activity is that which proceeds from one agent to another, as is the case when fire heats
a kettle; the heat from the fire is transferred to the kettle itself and thus the activity proceeds from
10 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought, trans. Patrick Cummins
(U.S.: Ex Fontibus, 2015), 83. 11 ST, I, q. 14, a. 2.
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the agent to something extrinsic. Because in the case of human knowers12 each act of
understanding is an admixture of both immanent and transeunt activity—this being the case
because while the conformity of knower and known is intrinsic to the human agent, and therefore
immanent, what is known comes to the agent extrinsically and thus the human intellect is
reduced from potency to act as it is moved by an intelligible species that is not identical with
itself—such understanding is clearly not what Thomas has in mind.
When it is said that God knows himself through himself, or by knowing himself, the idea
is that where human knowers are concerned there are two potencies present, viz. the intellect and
the intelligible, or the knower and the thing known, the former of which is moved to act when
knowing or understanding occurs. With God, however, there is no such distinction between the
divine intellect and the intelligible species it knows, nor between knower and what is known, as
the two are identical in God and his act of understanding. Aquinas writes,
Since therefore God has nothing in Him of potentiality, but is pure act, His
intellect and its object are altogether the same; so that He neither is without the
intelligible species, as is the case with our intellect when it understands
potentially; nor does the intelligible species differ from the substance of the divine
intellect, as it differs in our intellect when it understands actually; but the
intelligible species itself is the divine intellect itself, and thus God understands
Himself through Himself.13
Here, then, the intelligible species and the divine intellect are identified as one and the same in
God’s act of understanding, so there is no distinction in God between himself and what he
knows. On this, Dolezal notes, “Whereas humans know themselves by way of information, God
does not. He is wholly identical both with his intelligible nature and the intellectual act by which
12 While mention has been made previously to both human and angelic intellects, the human intellect,
knowledge, and understanding—being most familiar—will be employed primarily where need arises to
contrast and illumine these same attributes and acts with respect to God. 13 ST, I, q. 14, a. 2.
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he knows his nature.”14 As such, God’s knowledge in its entirety is a unified act of understanding
himself through himself, identical as knower and known, and thus without potency or real
division of intellect and what is intelligible as is the case with human knowers.15
The view that God understands by knowing himself through himself is essential to
Aquinas’s articulation of how God knows everything else. For in knowing himself, Aquinas
thinks, God is therefore able to know all things other than himself, and this he establishes via two
arguments. Having claimed that “God necessarily knows things other than Himself,”16 Aquinas
observes,
For it is manifest that He perfectly understands Himself…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.17
Again, in a formal structure more palatable to the analytic taste, the argument might be presented
as follows:
(1) If something is perfectly known, then its power is perfectly known.
(2) God understands himself perfectly.
(3) Therefore, God’s power is perfectly known to himself.
(4) If a thing’s power is perfectly known, then to what that power extends is perfectly
known.
(5) God’s power is perfectly known to himself.
14 James E. Dolezal, God Without Parts: Divine Simplicity and the Metaphysics of God’s
Absoluteness (Eugene, OR: Pickwick, 2011), 168. 15 At this point it is important to emphasize the traditional Thomist position that human talk about
God is necessarily deficient in its mode of signification (modus significandi) and requires analogical
predication. Goris is instructive on this point after having explicated Thomas’s negative theology and use
of analogy: “…our talking about God can be true (or false) but is always imperfect. The deficiency is
given with the very heart of human language.” Harm J.M.J. Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God:
Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will (Leuven, BE: Peeters, 1996),
33. Thus, it is crucial to guard against reading too far into any comparison between God and creature,
however informative, or to allow the comparisons a foothold leading to an anthropomorphized conception
of God. 16 ST, I, q. 14, a. 5. 17 ST, I, q. 14, a. 5.
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(6) Therefore, all things to which God’s power extends is perfectly known.
Because God is, as Aquinas rightly claims, the first efficient cause of everything that exists, and
because the divine power necessarily extends to each of these as an effect, God, by knowing
himself and his power perfectly, knows perfectly all things other than himself.
The second argument Aquinas makes is again related to his self-knowledge, and this with
respect to all things known pre-existing in God in an intelligible way. On this, we read,
[T]he very existence of the first effective cause—viz. God—is His own act of
understanding. Hence whatever effects pre-exist in God, as in the first cause, must
be in His act of understanding, and all things must be in Him according to an
intelligible mode: for everything which is in another, is in it according to the
mode of that in which it is.18
Recalling that God’s knowledge is possessed in an undivided and identical act of intellect and
intelligible, knower and known, the idea is that because every effect pre-exists in God
eminently19 and is known according to the mode of the knower, namely God, they are known
through his essence in a fully intelligible and perfect way. Hence, having distinguished the way
in which things are known by God, Aquinas concludes with a concise summary: “So we say that
God sees Himself in Himself, because He sees Himself through His essence; and He sees other
things not in themselves, but in Himself; inasmuch as His essence contains the similitude of
things other than Himself.”20
18 ST, I, q. 14, a. 5. 19 Effects are said to be contained in, or pre-exist in, their cause or totality of causes either formally,
virtually, or eminently, in what is typically termed the Principle of Proportionate Causality. See e.g. ST, I,
q. 4, a. 2. Edward Feser uses the example of causing someone to have twenty dollars by illustrating that
one may hand over a twenty-dollar bill (formal), transfer twenty dollars from one account to another
electronically (virtual), or possess all the necessary equipment and power for printing a brand new
twenty-dollar bill altogether (eminent). See Edward Feser, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary
Introduction (Heusenstamm, HR: Editiones Scholasticae, 2014), 154-155. In each instance twenty dollars,
the effect, pre-exists in some way in the cause. 20 ST, I, q. 14, a. 5.
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Having established that God understands himself through himself, viz. by knowing
himself through knowing his own essence, and that by this self-knowledge he also knows all
things other than himself—via both his power qua first efficient cause and because as effects
they pre-exist in him eminently—it is important to consider the mode of being in which God is
said to possess this knowledge. This mode is said to be eternal, or the entirely complete,
successionless duration of that which is ipsum esse subsistens, Subsistent Being Itself. Care must
be taken in this instance not to rely too heavily on the concept of duration as predicated of God,
as duration typically signifies a span or length of time measurable in some sense, and this sort of
existence Thomists explicitly deny of God.21 Aquinas himself expresses the problem in the
following way: “The difficulty in this matter arises from the fact that we can describe the divine
knowledge only after the manner of our own, at the same time pointing out the temporal
differences.”22 Thus, the inherent limitations of temporal and spatial examples ought to be noted
as further evidence of necessarily analogous God-talk.
Providing a clear and succinct articulation of the Thomist view of eternity, Shanley
writes,
Eternity is fundamentally a negative notion describing the perfect actuality of
existence without any limitation (ens extra terminos). It is uncaused existence
without beginning or end (interminabilis). It is undivided existence without parts
or succession (tota simul). It is fully realized and abiding existence; none of God's
life is still to come and none has passed away.23
Equipped with such a definition, and with respect to God’s eternal mode of knowing, we can
confidently establish the Thomistic view with a selection of quotes. First, Aquinas states,
“…since the vision of divine knowledge is measured by eternity, which is all simultaneous and
21 See ST, I, q. 10. 22 Thomas Aquinas, De veritate, q. 2, a. 12, at DHS Priory, www.dhspriory.org/thomas/. 23 Brian J. Shanley, “Eternity and Duration in Aquinas,” The Thomist 61 (1997), 544.
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yet includes the whole of time without being absent from any part of it, it follows that God sees
whatever happens in time, not as future, but as present.”24 Similarly, “…God's act of
understanding, which is His being, is measured by eternity; and since eternity is without
succession, comprehending all time, the present glance of God extends over all time, and to all
things which exist in any time, as to objects present to Him.”25 And again, in denying that God’s
knowledge is variable, Aquinas notes, “…for whatever is, or can be in any period of time, is
known by God in His eternity. Therefore from the fact that a thing exists in some period of time,
it follows that it is known by God from eternity.”26 Finally, in the well-known passage regarding
God’s knowledge of future contingents, Aquinas writes, “…all things that are in time are present
to God from eternity, not only because He has the types of things present within Him, as some
say; but because His glance is carried from eternity over all things as they are in their
presentiality.”27
What is evident from the foregoing is that Aquinas’s position on God’s eternal
knowledge amounts to both (1) the real presence of all actual things to God in eternity and (2)
that all actual things are not simultaneously present to one another in themselves but undergo
temporal succession of generation and corruption. Here, then, a nuanced exposition of two
critical components is required so as to disentangle the common conclusion that Aquinas is
inconsistent on this issue in that he regularly seems to espouse an A-theory of time and yet
implicitly advocates for a B-theory of time as a means of reconciling difficulties. On these two
views of time, Goris notes, “On an A-view, temporal becoming is real and the present has a
metaphysical priority over past and future…According to the B-theory…temporal becoming is
24 De veritate, q. 2, a. 12. 25 ST, I, q. 14, a. 9. 26 ST, I, q. 14, a. 15, ad. 2. 27 ST, I, q. 14, a. 13.
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subjective and mind-dependent, and the present is metaphysically on a par with the past and the
future.”28
The first component insists on an affirmation that it is in God’s mode of eternality that all
things are present, and that this should not be construed as some additional and parallel timeline
of duration where one ‘present’ moment in the world is coextensive and ‘present’ in eternity as
well. This is nothing more than placing God into time, as it were, and an equivocation of the
presentness in each statement given that a thing’s presence in itself in the world and its presence
to God in his eternity are not identical ontological orders, and we therefore employ the two
analogically. In discussing the issue of future events, Lonergan is emphatic on this: “But St
Thomas denies that God knows events as future. He is not in time but an eternal ‘now’ to which
everything is present.”29 Lonergan’s point is further clarified by Stebbins: “In other words, God’s
activity and created reality are simultaneous—not in the sense that can be represented in our
imagination by the juxtaposition of parallel time-lines, but in the sense that for God, who is not
in time at all, past, present, and future are identical.”30 As per the Thomist axiom, Cognitum
autem est in cognoscente secundum modum cognoscentis,31 a thing is known in the knower
according to the mode of the knower. Thus, a stone is known immaterially in the mind by the
intellect and not in its physicality—that is, one does not come to possess a physical stone in his
mind when he cognizes the stone, but rather possesses the intelligible species of the stone
immaterially entirely apart from the stone’s material conditions. Similarly, God’s mode is eternal
and hence his knowledge, too, is eternal, so things are present to him in eternity even as they are
28 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 90. 29 Bernard Lonergan, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, ed.
Frederick E. Crowe and Robert M. Doran (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 107. 30 J. Michael Stebbins, The Divine Initiative: Grace, World-Order, and Human Freedom in the Early
Writings of Bernard Lonergan (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 263. 31 ST, I, q. 12, a. 4.
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past, present, and future in our temporal mode. In the same way that the stone can be both
materially present in itself and immaterially present in the intellect of the knower according to
the mode of each, so things can be present all at once in eternity and relate as past, present, and
future in the temporal order, again according to the mode of each.
Goris elucidates the preceding resolution profoundly and is worth quoting at length to see
just how the Thomist, utilizing Aquinas’s own positions, can bring clarity to the issue:
God, however, does not know by way of tensed propositions. He does not know
by way of tenseless propositions either, for tenses belong intrinsically to
propositions…He knows temporal things tenselessly. That is not to say that He
knows them to be tenseless, for they are not. It concerns the mode of knowing,
which does not have to be the same as the mode of being of the objects that are
known…According to this interpretation, the real presence of temporal things to
eternity does not depend on their tenseless mode of being, but on the eternal mode
of being of God. When temporal things are said to be present to the eternal God, a
temporal expression is used to signify a relation between something temporal and
something atemporally eternal. The consequence is that the term ‘present’ in the
phrase ‘present-to-eternity’ is used analogically. While something future is future
both absolutely in itself and in relation to present temporal beings, it cannot be
said to be future in relation to eternity. The future relates to eternity as present to
present. The basis for this is the ineffable and incomprehensible divine way of
being: eternity.32
This first component is therefore understood in its recognition that there is not one single mode
of existing and knowing at work, viz. an equal and corresponding ontological plane of being and
connectivity between God and creature, but two distinct and utterly incommensurable modes,
namely eternity and the temporal order.
The second component builds upon the first and further refines the Thomist stance that all
things are present to and known by God in his eternity, and that they are also past, present, and
future relative to one another in the temporal order. In several separate works Aquinas
32 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 253-254.
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unequivocally affirms that God’s knowledge is the cause of everything that is.33 This relates to
what was previously concluded, namely that God knows things other than himself as the first
efficient cause of all that is and perfectly knows all that to which his creative power extends.
Before offering Aquinas’s solution, Shanley issues an important clarification:
Nothing skews an account of Aquinas more than the erroneous imputation to God
of a perceptual paradigm of knowledge. Far from being a passive Big Viewer of
the temporal panorama, Aquinas’s God is the active cause making it to be. God’s
knowledge is not effected by and dependent upon what is known, but rather is
itself causative of what is known: Scientia dei est causa rerum.34
As with the aforementioned issues related to time, the real presence of things in God’s eternity
with respect to his knowledge qua first efficient cause also needs to avoid being construed
wrongly, in this case as a species of perception. Shanley continues: “The very same divine
essence that is the primary object of God’s self-knowledge is also the medium whereby (medium
quo) God knows everything else as it actually exists precisely because the divine essence is the
cause of that creaturely existence.”35 Thus, for Aquinas, the eternal self-knowledge of God qua
cause, and this again by knowing himself through himself, provides sufficient support for his
knowledge of things really present to him in eternity, as there is no thing that escapes the divine
causality. Shanley is once again helpful:
…God’s knowledge extends as far as his causality and God’s causality extends to
every aspect of every being as the causa esse. Since God’s causing is eternal, it is
by one infinitely fecund act that everything that ever exists comes into being at its
determinate time as the effect of God’s intentional (knowledge and will) agency.
By an act that transcends and creates time, the temporal springs into existence at
its proper moment. What is future quoad nos is present to God as the object or
33 See e.g., ST, I, q. 14, a. 8; De veritate, q. 2, a. 14; Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, I, 67, in
Summa contra gentiles: Book I; God, trans. Anton C. Pegis (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1975), 222. 34 Brian J. Shanley, “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” American Catholic
Philosophical Quarterly 71, no. 2 (1997), 205. 35 Shanley, “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” 209.
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term of his eternal causality. It is only from this perspective of God’s eternal
causal activity that the temporal is really present to God’s knowledge.36
Thus, God qua eternal and God qua first efficient cause, and all through the lens of knowing
himself through himself via the divine essence, properly grounds the Thomistic position in
answer to the question of how God knows. In consideration of the qualification of God qua first
efficient cause and moving more towards an understanding of God’s creative act, we turn next to
an explication of God as the cause of things.
God’s Knowledge as the Cause of Things
For Aquinas, God’s knowledge is the cause of things precisely because knowledge serves
as the principle from which anything is or can be made actual, as is the case with the artificer and
his work. Aquinas says as much, stating, “The knowledge of God is the cause of things. For the
knowledge of God is to all creatures what the knowledge of the artificer is to things made by his
art.”37 It is this relationship between God’s knowledge and the created order that allows the
Thomistic view to take shape when the affirmation is made that God’s knowledge is the cause of
things, as knowledge in itself is not a cause but becomes so through its attachment to the will.38
Aquinas continues: “Now the knowledge of the artificer is the cause of the things made by his art
from the fact that the artificer works by his intellect.”39 As with the artificer, God possesses
knowledge of those things to which his power can extend and it is this knowledge viewed in light
of its causal connection that is both the very reason anything at all exists, and also for it existing
as the kind of thing it is. Goris notes, “While our vision and knowledge are dependent on, caused
36 Shanley, “Eternal Knowledge of the Temporal in Aquinas,” 218. 37 ST, I, q. 14, a. 8. 38 Because chapter two is dedicated to the topic of God’s willing of creation, this position will be
presented and developed therein and mentioned here only briefly. 39 ST, I, q. 14, a. 8.
15
by and measured by the things seen and known, the reverse holds for God’s knowledge: His
knowledge is creative and it is the measure of the things known.”40 Goris here draws attention to
the distinction between that of logical truth, viz. the conformity of the mind to the thing known,
and ontological or metaphysical truth, viz. the conformity of the thing(s) to the mind.41 It is, of
course, the latter the Thomist has in mind when affirming that God’s knowledge is the cause of
things, as everything that exists does so in conformity to the divine idea God possesses of it.
With respect to the notion of God’s knowledge qua cause of things, this is further related
to, and refined by, Aquinas’s position on the divine ideas. In affirming that there exist divine
ideas,42 Aquinas explains that these ideas are the forms of things existing apart from the things
themselves of which they are the form and intimates that this is the case for two reasons related
to their end: (1) as a productive exemplar; and (2) as a principle of knowledge. Aquinas argues
for this twofold division as follows:
In all things not generated by chance, the form must be the end of any generation
whatsoever. But an agent does not act on account of the form, except in so far as
the likeness of the form is in the agent…Whereas in other agents (the form of the
thing to be made pre-exists) according to intelligible being, as in those that act by
the intellect…As then the world was not made by chance, but by God acting by
His intellect…there must exist in the divine mind a form to the likeness of which
the world was made. And in this the notion of an idea consists.43
Ideas, then, are necessary in order to account for the knowledge God possesses of all things and
the production of existing things according as he acts by way of intellect to secure their
ontological truth. Doolan puts it concisely: “…Thomas considers ideas, whether human or
40 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 65. 41 For more on these two distinctions, and Aquinas on truth in general, see John F. Wippel, “Truth in
Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics 43, no. 2 (1989): 295-326. For the sake of clarity,
ontological truth will be used for the remainder of this work. 42 See, e.g., De veritate, q. 3 and ST, I, q. 15. 43 ST, I, q. 15, a. 1.
16
divine, to be principles both of cognition and of production. It is in the latter role that they act as
exemplar causes.”44
Returning to the comparison between God and the artificer, and offering crucial
clarificatory remarks, Doolan notes, “Unlike the human artisan, however, whose ideas are
originally derived in some way from the external world, God’s ideas are not derived from
anywhere other than himself. The divine ideas, therefore, must somehow be present in his very
essence.”45 This knowledge of divine ideas, whether merely cognitive or exemplar, is the result
of God’s knowledge of himself through himself, which we recall includes God’s capacity to
know things other than himself via his power and because they pre-exist in him in such a way
Aquinas refers to as “similitude.”46 It is this similitude, or likeness, which grounds the divine
ideas in both of their modes, being present in the divine essence and understood thereby.
Consider Doolan’s excellent summary:
Its full character [divine ideas] involves God’s knowledge of the particular
relationship that a particular creature bears (or can bear, as regards possible
creatures) to his essence. Hence, it is his knowledge of the divine essence as
imitable that is the central characteristic of a divine idea. And it is because the
divine essence admits of diverse imitations that we can speak of many divine
ideas.47
Thus, on the Thomistic view, divine ideas designate the plurality of ideas corresponding directly
to the myriad ways in which God understands himself and the divine essence as imitable,48
extending further in some instances as a productive principle by way of exemplar causality.
44 Gregory T. Doolan, Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes (Washington, D.C.: Catholic
University of America Press, 2008), 42. 45 Doolan, Divine Ideas, 82. 46 ST, I, q. 14, a. 5. 47 Doolan, Divine Ideas, 92. 48 ST, I, q. 15, a. 2: “So far, therefore, as God knows His essence as capable of such imitation by any
creature, He knows it as the particular type and idea of that creature; and in like manner as regards other
creatures. So it is clear that God understands many particular types of things and these are many ideas.”
17
Reflecting on the previous considerations reveals several important aspects to the overall
Thomistic view of God’s knowledge as the cause of things. First, because God’s knowledge is
not received or determined by anything outside of himself, his knowledge is the measure of
ontological truth absolutely and all things that are, insofar as they exist as mere ideas or
exemplars, originate in the mind of God and participate imitatively more or less in the divine
essence itself. Second, there is no mode or instance of being whatsoever—whether genera,
species, individual substances, accidents, or pure possibles—to which God’s knowledge does not
extend as either an idea or exemplar; God knows all there is to know about all that is and could
be. Third, and following closely upon the second, God is thus the cause of existence in every
individual thing entirely and in all its various degrees of being. To this truth, Anderson writes,
The cause of existence is ipso facto the cause of a thing’s total being: existence
actualizes a thing in its integrity, because it actualizes is qua being. Existence is
an act which penetrates the entire entity of a thing making all the entity that the
thing has: the cause of existence is the cause of everything that pertains to, or
participates in, existence, as such…so the cause of existence has as the proper and
adequate object of its efficiency the production of any and every substantial
being, precisely as being.49
Finally, God’s knowledge is clearly divisible into two categories, namely things that do not exist
and things that do exist. On the Thomistic view, this twofold division is sufficient and nothing
that actually is or is merely possible falls outside of its scope. With this in mind, the following
complementary inquiry will articulate a more nuanced presentation of this division.
God’s Knowledge: Simple Intelligence and Vision
The Thomistic understanding on the division of God’s eternal knowledge into two
distinct categories takes root in Aquinas’s discussions of God’s knowledge, specifically in
49 James F. Anderson, The Cause of Being: The Philosophy of Creation in St. Thomas (St. Louis, MO:
B. Herder, 1952), 30.
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consideration of whether God can know things that are not, and provides for us the answer to the
question as to what God knows. Beginning with De veritate, q. 2, a. 8, Aquinas affirms that God
knows non-beings and things that are not, have not been, and will not be. Relying once again on
the imagery of the artisan and his work, he writes, “…the Creator’s knowledge of creatures, and
the artist’s of his products, by its very nature, precedes the things known.”50 Because God in
knowing himself knows his own essence as imitable, and this in every way possible, he
possesses knowledge of creatures and their potential existence prior51 to any free creative act on
his part, just as the artist has within himself a knowledge of anything he might produce without
actually having yet made anything. Continuing, Aquinas says, “…God can know some non-
beings. Of some He has, as it were, practical knowledge—that is, of those which are, have been,
or will be…Of those which neither have been, are, nor will be…He has a kind of speculative
knowledge.”52
While in the passage from De veritate we do not yet see the terminology Aquinas would
eventually employ, his division therein accords with these later discussions. For example, we see
the following statement in the Summa contra gentiles where Aquinas defends the proposition
that God knows the things that are not:
For those things that are not, nor will be, nor ever were, are known by God as
possible to His power. Hence, God does not know them as in some way existing
in themselves, but as existing only in the divine power. These are said by some to
be known by God according to a knowledge of simple understanding. The things
that are present, past, or future to us God knows in His power, in their proper
causes, and in themselves. The knowledge of such things is said to be a
knowledge of vision.53
50 De veritate, q. 2, a. 8. 51 Priority here is not meant to indicate temporal sequence or logical ordering, a ‘time before time’ as
it were, but rather an ontological priority expressly relating to God’s causality and his eternal knowledge
of himself and all other things. 52 De veritate, q. 2, a. 8. 53 SCG, I, 66, trans. Pegis, 219-220.
19
Here, the Thomistic view begins taking shape as the division between knowledge of simple
intelligence (scientia simplicis intelligentiae) and knowledge of vision (scientia visionis) and is
made more clearly. The categories are rather straightforward in that the former, viz. simple
intelligence, is God’s knowledge of everything possible that remains as such, while the latter,
viz. vision, is God’s knowledge of all that exists regardless of its place in the temporal timeline
of the created order.
Aquinas further refines his view and responds to the same query, including additional
precision and clarification:
Now a certain difference is to be noted in the consideration of those things that
are not actual. For though some of them may not be in act now, still they were, or
they will be; and God is said to know all these with the knowledge of vision…But
there are other things in God's power, or the creature's, which nevertheless are
not, nor will be, nor were; and as regards these He is said to have knowledge, not
of vision, but of simple intelligence.54
What emerges from the convergence of each of these passages is a strong notion of omniscience
where nothing is beyond the knowledge of God, whether actual or purely possible. This final
passage provides an important piece of the overall Thomistic approach for subsequent
considerations regarding God’s knowledge of future contingent things, namely that in his simple
intelligence God possesses knowledge not only of his own power, but also that of every creature
as well. The insertion of this additional qualification within the context of the discussion on
God’s knowledge of what is not demonstrates Aquinas’s express affirmation that God’s
knowledge of what is purely possible is not limited to only what he can cause directly by his own
power but extends to the active and passive powers of secondary and instrumental causes as well.
The finalized Thomistic division of God’s knowledge consists of (1) knowledge of
simple intelligence, and (2) knowledge of vision. With respect to (1), this is God’s knowledge of
54 ST, I, q. 14, a. 9.
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pure possibles, understood solely as those things, whether in God’s own power or in that of his
creatures, that are never actualized at any moment but remain only ever possible. Regarding (2),
this is God’s knowledge of all existing things, whether past, present, or future relative to its
temporal frame of reference, and are always present to him in eternity. Though this division is
accessible and unambiguous, a few clarificatory remarks appear necessary given some of the
interpretive confusion that has arisen, both historically and more recently in contemporary
works. As an example of the former, Luis de Molina, the famous interlocutor of Domingo Bañez
during the De Auxiliis controversy,55 wrongly interprets Aquinas’s division he provides in article
nine quoted above. Molina writes, “…depending only on whether or not its object exists, one and
the same cognition, equally evident and equally perfect in its own right, is called either an
intuitive cognition or else a cognition of simple intelligence, as was shown in article 9.”56
Molina, further commenting on article nine of question fourteen, states, “…God’s knowledge of
things that are still contingently future in time does not, properly speaking, have the character of
a knowledge of vision until those things actually exist in time; rather, in the meantime it has the
character of a knowledge of simple intelligence, because the things that are its objects do not yet
exist.”57 Molina here suggests that future, non-existent contingents relative to our frame of
reference do not, contra Aquinas’s teaching, belong properly to vision but to simple intelligence,
and it is only when actually coming to exist in time that they are then contained within God’s
knowledge of vision. O’Connor’s summary of the discrepancy is succinct:
For St. Thomas the existence of an object does not change the kind of knowledge
God has of it, as it does for Molina. The knowledge of simple intelligence for
Molina does not mean a knowledge of possibilities which will never be realized,
55 For more on this controversy see Ryan Thomas McKay, “Congregatio de Auxiliis,” in New
Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Berard L. Marthaler, 2nd ed., vol. 4 (Detroit: Gale, 2003), 110-113. 56 Luis de Molina, Concordia, disp. 49, sect. 12, in On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the
Concordia, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), 120-121. 57 Molina, Concordia, disp. 49, sect. 20, 127, emphasis in original.
21
as it does for St. Thomas in article nine of question fourteen. It is simply a
knowledge of things before God's decree to make then actual. This may be good
Molinistic doctrine, but it is not the doctrine of the article of St. Thomas that
Molina undertakes to explain.58
Molina tends to overlap vision and simple intelligence in a way entirely absent in Aquinas’s
works, specifically the very article he is expounding in his commentary.
Along these same lines is a recent work of analytic philosophical theology by R.T.
Mullins—an admirable attempt to refute, discard, and bury the classical conception of an eternal,
timeless God—wherein several false or ambiguous interpretive claims are made regarding
Aquinas’s twofold division of simple intelligence and vision and the Thomist views derived
therefrom. In explaining the Thomist position, Mullins notes,
Since God’s power is His essence, given divine simplicity, He has a perfect
knowledge of all that He can produce. Further, God is pure act, so He has a
perfect knowledge of what He does in fact produce. All truths are thus represented
to God through His own essence. This is what the Thomists call natural or simple
knowledge.59
Here, Mullins lumps together ‘all truths’ as both God’s knowledge of those things he can
produce and those which he does produce, and says that this is what Thomists are referring to by
the concept of natural or simple knowledge.60 As should be clear from the foregoing articulation
of Aquinas’s division this is simply not the Thomistic view, as God’s knowledge of what can be
58 William R. O’Connor, “Molina and Bañez as Interpreters of St. Thomas Aquinas,” New
Scholasticism 21, no. 3 (1947), 251. 59 R.T. Mullins, The End of the Timeless God (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 92,
emphasis in original. 60 Of note is the fact that Mullins cites Thomas P. Flint, “Two Accounts of Providence,” in Oxford
Readings in Philosophical Theology, Volume 2: Providence, Scripture, and Resurrection, ed. Michael
Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 17-44, for his terminology while Flint himself admits
therein that he is using Molinist terms (see p. 21, fn. 10 and 11). For obvious reasons this contributes to
confusion where the view under consideration is that of Aquinas and the Thomists, as one would be hard
pressed to find such terminology within the Thomistic corpus apart from engagements with Molinism.
22
produced but never is Thomists refer to as simple intelligence, while his knowledge of what is
produced is referred to as vision.
Only a few paragraphs later Mullins writes, “One of the issues Aquinas tackles is about
God’s knowledge of non-existent things. For instance, the future does not yet exist. Can God’s
natural knowledge deliver knowledge of non-existents? Aquinas says yes.”61 This passage is
somewhat ambiguous and appears to make the same mistake as Molina, because while we have
seen that God’s natural or simple intelligence is of what does not, has not, and will not exist, the
future does not fall into this category given that while it does not exist in itself and is yet future
to us, it will in fact exist at a later moment in time and is therefore present to God in his eternity,
and thus falls under his knowledge of vision. The most charitable interpretation is that Mullins
has inadvertently slipped between a reference to God’s mode of knowing and that of our frame
of reference when he says that the future does not exist and considers this something non-
existent in the relevant sense to Aquinas’s view of simple intelligence.
Finally, Mullins raises a perceived problem for the Thomist view, particularly regarding
the doctrine of immutability, stating,
The present co-exists with eternity, and God knows the present by knowledge of
vision…Since the present is constantly changing, new moments of time are
constantly coming into being and co-existing with eternity, then no longer co-
existing with eternity as they cease to exist. Further, God’s knowledge of vision
will constantly be changing since He will constantly be aware of new concrete
particulars…future things do not exist as concrete objects until they become
present. When they become present, a proposition about them becomes true…In
Thomistic terms, when Socrates becomes present he begins to exist, and the
proposition <Socrates exists> begins to be true. When this occurs, it comes under
the gaze of God’s knowledge of vision.62
61 Mullins, Timeless God, 93. 62 Mullins, Timeless God, 95.
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Given the difficulty of determining whether in this passage Mullins is continuing his explanation
of the Thomist view or has shifted to a critical examination thereof, the following analysis
assumes the former as a means of further clarifying the Thomist position. As such, should the
latter be Mullins’s intention, the reader is encouraged to evaluate the argument on its own
philosophical merits. Mullins’s claims here as they relate to his interpretive understanding of
Aquinas’s position are problematic for two reasons, beginning with the fact that the present
doesn’t co-exist with eternity as if God and the temporal order existed alongside one another in
parallel timelines, nor does the present co-exist alone with eternity at the moment it is but, rather,
all moments of time are present to God’s eternity and are equally known by his knowledge of
vision.
Second, Mullins gives the impression that things possessing real being in themselves, viz.
concrete particulars, begin to exist in the present temporal order and come to be known in God’s
knowledge of vision. Likewise, those things that have yet to exist remain in his knowledge of
simple intelligence. This Big Viewer (to use Shanley’s expression) conception of God’s
knowledge as in some way perceptual is far too literal; quite simply, on the Thomist view, God
does not become aware of a thing as it comes into existence. Mullins appears to argue as follows:
the present exists at t2 and there corresponds at t2 God’s awareness in his knowledge of vision (v)
the same moment as it co-exists with eternity (E), while prior to the present’s existence, e.g. t1,
God has only knowledge of simple intelligence (s). Thus, t2 is coextensive with v2 in E, while t1 is
coextensive with s1 in E. On this view, as the present moment begins to exist it moves into the
gaze of God’s knowledge of vision and co-exists with eternity. The problem is evident
immediately; for, on the Thomist position, God’s knowledge of vision in his eternity is co-
extensive with the present not because things exist in themselves at the present moment, but
24
simply because they exist at any moment in time whatsoever. Thus, the Thomistic position
argues that every tx is co-extensive with vx in E, as the entirety of time and everything that did,
does, and will exist is known by God in his knowledge of vision, and this in his eternity.
What these two examples demonstrate is that the Thomist division of God’s knowledge
into simple intelligence and vision articulated by Aquinas has at times been subject to serious,
and perhaps even unintended, misinterpretations. Having disentangled these erroneous views
from the genuine Thomistic understanding, further illumining what Aquinas himself taught, a
full accounting of the Thomistic position of God’s knowledge has been achieved. As such, we
are properly situated to now consider two concerns related to what has been affirmed.
Objections
With the Thomistic view of God’s knowledge clearly established, two of the more
potentially problematic issues raised against such a position will be adequately addressed here in
order to forestall their further germination and development. First, and perhaps most troubling, is
the objection that God appears to be the cause of evil. The idea here is straightforward in that
evil is a real thing experienced and, as expounded above, God’s knowledge is the cause of
everything that is. Therefore, God’s knowledge must also be the cause of evil. While Aquinas
affirms that God does indeed know evil,63 he unequivocally denies that God either wills or
causes evil directly.64 But how can this be?
Formulating a Thomistic answer to this difficulty requires the recognition of several key
components of God’s causal activity and the nature of evil itself. Beginning with the latter,
Garrigou-Lagrange gives a terse and suitable definition by which to proceed: “…the essence of
63 See ST, I, q. 14, a. 10 and SCG, I, 71. 64 See ST, I, q. 19, a. 9; SCG, I, 95; ST, I, q. 49, a. 2.
25
evil consists in the privation of good.”65 Stebbins further bolsters this definition by providing an
additional one for privation: “A privation is the absence or lack of some reality that ought to
exist or occur, of some part or aspect needed for the completion of some whole.”66 Properly
speaking, the nature of evil is not that of a thing in itself but is, rather, the privation of some
positive reality of good that ought to be present.67 For example, it belongs to the nature and
goodness of a Honeycrisp apple to be, among other things, crisp, juicy, sweet, and nutritious.
Should the apple become soft, dry, bitter, and lose its nutritional value, it is no longer a good
apple. What is important to note, additionally, is that the apple still possesses being even as it is
no longer a good apple, and it is this positive existence in relation to what is absent or lacking
from it that its deficiency of goodness is made known. Likewise, the moral evil of human acts
consists in the defective willing of the agent, removing itself from the intelligible order of what it
ought to will (malum culpae). Thus, as a privation, evil is a being of reason (ens rationis) in
relation to the positive and good nature of which it is an accident, particularly regarding human
acts of the will.
Because “sin is the will’s failure to act as God intends it to act,”68 God does not know and
therefore cause sin qua sin; instead, God knows the evil of sin by first knowing all the attendant
goodness a human person ought to possess and subsequently the variety of ways in which this
essential goodness is absent and lacking from it. What emerges from these considerations is the
fact that God’s knowledge is the cause of things and their goodness insofar as they possess real
being, an actus essendi, and merely permits their defectiveness, as when the free will does not
65 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, The One God, trans. Bede Rose (U.S.: Ex Fontibus, 2012), 445. 66 Stebbins, The Divine Initiative, 270. 67 See Thomas Aquinas, On Evil, q. 1, a. 1, trans. Richard Regan (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 55-62. 68 Stebbins, The Divine Initiative, 272.
26
will as it ought. Lonergan notes, “…there are three categories with regard to the divine will;
there is what God wills to take place; there is what God wills not to take place; and, in the third
place, there is what God permits to take place.”69 This threefold division accords with Aquinas’s
affirmation that “God therefore neither wills evil to be done, nor wills it not to be done, but wills
to permit evil to be done….”70 This permission is always subservient to the overall good of the
created order, the end of which is God himself, and allows Aquinas to say, “…He [God] in no
way wills the evil of sin, which is the privation of right order towards the divine good. The evil
of natural defect, or of punishment, He does will, by willing the good to which such evils are
attached….”71 The objection that God is somehow the cause of evil simply does not follow, for
God is only the cause of evil insofar as he is the direct cause of a thing’s esse, real being, and
therefore the nature and goodness from which the relation to evil as privation is considered, and
merely permits such defectiveness as it is further ordered to some other good.
The second potentially problematic issue concerning the knowledge of God has as its
foundation an alternative view that brings into question the sufficiency of the twofold division of
simple intelligence and vision as it relates specifically to the future free acts of indeterminate
causes, particularly those of human agents. Molinism, the system of thought owing its name and
essential doctrines to Luis de Molina (AD 1535-1600), posits an additional, third division of
God’s knowledge referred to as scientia media, or middle knowledge.72 Freddoso describes
middle knowledge as follows:
69 Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 330. 70 ST, I, q. 19, a. 9, ad. 3. 71 ST, I, q. 19, a. 9. 72 For more on Molina, Molinism, and presentations and defenses of middle knowledge see, e.g., Luis
de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: Part IV of the Concordia, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1988); Thomas P. Flint, Divine Providence: The Molinist Account (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1998); William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine
Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999); Kirk R. MacGregor, Luis de
27
…according to Molina, if there is genuine causal indeterminism in the created
world, God can be provident in the way demanded by orthodoxy only if His
prevolitional knowledge includes an understanding of which effects would in fact
result from causal chains involving indeterministic created causes. But this is just
for God to have full prevolitional knowledge of conditional future contingents.
Since this knowledge has metaphysically contingent states of affairs as its objects,
it is not part of God’s natural knowledge; since it is prevolitional, it is not part of
God’s free knowledge. It stands ‘midway’ between natural knowledge and free
knowledge—hence its title, middle knowledge.73
Thus, for Molina and the Molinist view generally, the motivation is primarily to preserve
genuine libertarian freedom of the human will in relation to God’s sovereignty and providential
ordering of the world. As Freddoso holds, the unique feature of middle knowledge is that God
possesses knowledge of these free contingent acts—what he refers to as conditional future
contingents are also known in contemporary literature as counterfactuals of creaturely freedom
(CCF)—prevolitionally, i.e. prior to any creative act of willing this world or any other. The
literature debating the merits and perceived difficulties of middle knowledge is vast, and the
following response is not intended as a contribution thereto.74
That the twofold Thomistic division of God’s knowledge into simple intelligence and
vision is sufficient in toto—precluding as it does the need for middle knowledge to account for
God’s knowledge of future contingent events—can be seen in what has been brought forth
previously with respect to God’s mode of knowing and being. In beginning his response to the
question of whether God knows future contingent things, Aquinas answers affirmatively:
“…God knows all things; not only things actual but also things possible to Him and creature; and
Molina: The Life and Theology of the Founder of Middle Knowledge (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan,
2015); Kenneth Keathley, Salvation and Sovereignty: A Molinist Approach (Nashville, TN: B&H, 2010);
John D. Laing, Middle Knowledge: Human Freedom in Divine Sovereignty (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel
Academic, 2018); and Eef Dekker, Middle Knowledge (Leuven, BE: Peeters, 2000). 73 Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge, 23. 74 For a recent survey of the issues surrounding the debate see Ken Perszyk, Molinism: The
Contemporary Debate (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
28
since some of these are future contingent to us, it follows that God knows future contingent
things.”75 The qualification of future contingent to us is important for understanding that, on the
Thomistic view, every future contingent thing, event, or act is future only insofar as it stands in
reference to the present or any temporal designation prior to its occurrence in the created order.
On the Thomistic view, there simply is nothing future to God, as everything is known in a single,
eternal intuition, and this whether it actually exists at any moment or does so only as something
possible in God’s power or that of the creature. Lonergan writes, “…why should one consider
the adaequatio of divine knowledge not to the event as future but to the event as present?
Because the former is false and the latter is true. All things are eternally present to God.”76
If, as Aquinas and the Thomists insist, God’s knowledge is never of the future but always
of what is present in his eternity, then every contingent thing actually or possibly is possessed by
this knowledge as well—contained within one of the two divisions outlined previously, namely
that of simple intelligence and vision. Additionally, the Thomistic view holds that CCFs are
known simultaneously and eternally by God and there simply is no room to further divide his
knowledge, as these must be known in his simple intelligence as something that was not, is not,
and never will be actualized regarding the possible contingent acts of an agent. It is precisely in
affirming God’s knowledge of simple intelligence and vision, both in his eternity, that the denial
of anything future-to-God follows, and thus to speak of God’s knowledge of future things must
always remain understood as a mixture of imperfect language. This, we recall, is something
Aquinas was acutely aware of:
The difficulty in this matter arises from the fact that we can describe the divine
knowledge only after the manner of our own, at the same time pointing out the
temporal differences. For example, if we were to describe God’s knowledge as it
75 ST, I, q. 14, a. 13. 76 Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 326.
29
is, we should have to say that God knows that this is, rather than that it will be; for
to Him every thing is present and nothing is future.77
There is then no deficiency arising from the twofold division of God’s knowledge into simple
intelligence and vision, as the actual contingent free acts of an agent—and, again, whether past,
present, or future to us—and those purely possible in his own power, are fully known by God in
his eternity.
Finally, and again in contrast to the Molinist view, there is no ambiguity when speaking
of the division of God’s knowledge as there is when positing scientia media as one of three
logical moments present within the ordering of God’s knowledge—the three, in logical order, are
natural knowledge, middle knowledge, and free knowledge. This Molinist division is admittedly
difficult to pin down given that the distinct moments are said not to be temporal even as the first
two are completely unattached to the divine will,78 and as deliberation of some sort must be said
to occur.79
The Thomistic view, however, views the division of God’s knowledge as relating to the
order of signification in our way of speaking and to nothing in God himself. On this, Goris
observes, “Aquinas’ distinction regards only intensional semantic distinctions on the level of
words. One term expresses something that another term does not express; one term prescinds
from certain notions while another term prescinds from other notions.”80 Continuing, Goris
77 De veritate, q. 2, a. 12. 78 MacGregor notes, “Because the content of middle knowledge does not lie within the scope of
God’s will or omnipotence, God cannot control what he knows via middle knowledge, any more than he
can control what he knows via natural knowledge.” MacGregor, Luis de Molina, 93. 79 For example, Laing writes, “…it has become customary to speak of a logical priority in divine
thoughts. This is not to deny the simplicity or omniscience of God, or to say that He gains knowledge that
He did not previously possess. Rather, it is simply to acknowledge that dependency relationships exist
between certain kinds of knowledge. It is also to acknowledge that something analogous to deliberation
may take place in the divine mind.” John D. Laing, “Middle Knowledge,” in The Internet Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. James Fieser and Bradley Dowden, at www.iep.utm.edu. 80 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 81.
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states, “In Aquinas’ view, we may talk about divine knowledge ‘apart from’ divine will in the
sense of ‘leaving out of consideration’ or ‘prescinding from.’ But such conceptual distinctions
are completely reduced to our mode of understanding (and of signifying): they do not reflect any
real structure in God.”81 What this means on the Thomistic view is that there is no real
distinction of God’s knowledge and will, as both reduce to our mode of understanding and
signifying the same reality, viz. God’s essence. It is on this consideration that the two points
converge, namely that God’s knowledge in his eternity encompasses everything actual or purely
possible, including contingent things, and that there is no real structure or logical ordering of
moments therein given that God’s knowing and willing are reducible to one and the same eternal,
immutable act of the divine essence itself. Thus, the division of God’s knowledge into that of
simple intelligence and vision is sufficient, as what is known via middle knowledge on the
Molinist account is known via simple intelligence on the Thomistic account.
Summary
As the metaphysical centerpiece of the entire Thomistic account of God’s creative act,
God’s knowledge serves to provide the proper foundation for the supplementary explication of
his willing of creation and the relation he stands in thereto. Eminently immaterial, perfectly self-
subsistent as the full plenitude of being itself, God has only himself and the divine essence as the
formal object of his knowledge. It is in knowing himself through himself by which he knows and
understands everything else, and this by knowing the divine essence as imitable in the form of
divine ideas and exemplars to which the divine power can and does extend. This eternal mode of
knowing does not of itself preclude temporal succession, as God is not himself in time or co-
81 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 82.
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extensive with it, but is, rather, outside of time completely. These two modes of existence are
distinct so that what is present to God in his eternity need not exist timelessly in itself, as all
things present in eternity relate to one another as past, present, and future in the temporal order.
In his eternity God knows everything that was, is, and will be, and everything that was not, is
not, and never will be, all divided as such into his knowledge of vision and knowledge of simple
intelligence. Each component of God’s knowledge now in its proper position furnishes the
requisite material as consideration proceeds regarding his willing of creation.
CHAPTER TWO: GOD’S WILLING OF CREATION
Given his prior commitment to God’s possession of intellect, Aquinas affirms that God
possesses will. This is because, for Aquinas, “…will follows upon intellect.”82 Additionally,
while the will is said to be an appetite, or desire, its “essential activity…is the love of the
good.”83 It is in this way that Aquinas distinguishes God’s will from that of human agents:
Will in us belongs to the appetitive part, which, although named from appetite,
has not for its only act the seeking what it does not possess; but also the loving
and the delighting in what it does possess. In this respect will is said to be in God,
as having always good which is its object, since, as already said, it is not distinct
from His essence.84
What begins to emerge in Aquinas’s account of God’s will is that it has the goodness of God
himself as its object and that this is nothing more than the divine essence itself, as God and his
goodness are one and the same.
82 ST, I, q. 19, a. 1. 83 George Hayward Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, ed. Paul A. Böer, Sr. (U.S.: Veritatis
Splendor Publications, 2013), 295. 84 ST, I, q. 19, a. 1, ad. 2.
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In attributing will to God in this way there follow three specific areas of inquiry
necessary for further elucidation of God’s will in relation to his creative act, namely God’s will
and its object, God’s entitative perfection and intrinsic sameness, and divine freedom.
Addressing these points will not only further clarify the Thomist position but will also serve to
provide the requisite tools for satisfactorily responding to objections related to modal notions and
the doctrine of Divine Simplicity.
Creation and the Object of God’s Will
As previously mentioned, Aquinas affirms that God possesses will85 and that God’s will
has as its principal object his own goodness which is nothing other than the divine essence itself.
Aquinas states, “The understood good is the object of the will…But that which is principally
understood by God is the divine essence…The divine essence, therefore, is principally the object
of the divine will.”86 Aquinas writes elsewhere, “…the object of the divine will is His goodness,
which is His essence.”87 Like God’s knowledge of himself via his essence, God’s willing of his
own goodness is not merely the goodness which ought to be willed but is in fact willed and
eternally possessed. On this, Garrigou-Lagrange notes, “…the formal object of the divine will is
the divine goodness, which of itself is not only lovable, but is actually and eternally loved; just as
the divine truth is of itself not only actually understandable, but is actually and eternally
understood.”88
The distinction Aquinas makes between the human will and the divine will is important
because it removes from the latter the human aspects of deliberation, imperfection, and the
85 See, e.g. ST, I, q. 19, a. 1; SCG, I, 72; and De veritate, q. 23, a. 1. 86 SCG, I, 74, trans. Pegis, 244. 87 ST, I, q. 19, a. 1, ad. 3. 88 Garrigou-Lagrange, The One God, 497.
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notion of means for realizing the end. For God, everything is known in his eternity, and thus
there is no movement of his intellect from knowing one thing to knowing the next. Additionally,
where the human will is concerned, the universal good is not yet obtained and so this formal
object moving the will is also what permits its variability in willing this or that means to attain
certain further ends that are ultimately ordered to this final end. By contrast, God, in willing his
own essence, eternally possesses and delights in that which he wills, and thus there exist no
means directed towards its fulfillment; nothing further is required for God to possess this end.
Duby correctly notes the importance of not conflating the two nor allowing a univocal
understanding to play a role in parsing the divine will: “…a firm distinction must be drawn
between the created will and the will of God, for the former is characterized by dependency,
change and imperfection, precluding a univocity of the will in creatures and the Creator.”89
In willing his own essence, Aquinas states that God also wills creation: “God wills not
only Himself, but other things apart from Himself.”90 Elsewhere, Aquinas writes, “In the same
way, therefore, He principally wills Himself, and wills all other things in willing Himself.”91
Thus, God’s very same act of willing himself is also the act whereby he wills the entirety of
creation—all that was, is, or will be. Because, as we’ve seen, God fully possesses his own
essence and the goodness thereof that is the object of his will, creation itself cannot be said to be
a means for God reaching to fulfill some further end. Rather, Aquinas claims, “…He wills both
Himself to be, and other things to be; but Himself as the end, and other things as ordained to that
end….”92 Additionally, Aquinas states, “…that which is the highest good is, from the highest
89 Steven J. Duby, Divine Simplicity: A Dogmatic Account (New York: Bloomsbury T&T Clark,
2016), 196. 90 ST, I, q. 19, a. 2. 91 SCG, I, 75, trans. Pegis, 247. 92 ST, I, q. 19, a. 2.
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point of view, the end of all things. But there is only one highest good, and this is God…So, all
things are ordered to one good, as their end, and this is God.”93 As Anderson rightly notes, “…in
seeking its own goodness, each thing is seeking a likeness of the divine Good, so that in reality
the divine goodness is the absolutely final cause of all things.”94 The upshot of Aquinas’s view is
that the divine goodness is always and without exception the object of God’s willing, and this
whether and what God freely chooses to create. Thus, creation in its vast multitude of actual
being is fundamentally the various expressions of this same communicated divine goodness
ordered to God himself.
Created things that will in fact exist attach to God’s will and receive existence, doing so
as divine exemplars. While divine ideas are the ways in which God knows his essence as
imitable, exemplars are paired to God’s will. Clarifying is Doolan: “The will adds to the
intelligible form the inclination to an effect—an inclination that the form does not have of itself.
Thus, as with the artisan, God’s knowledge is a cause of things only inasmuch as his will is
joined to it.”95 It is the joining or pairing to God’s will that is the cause of things insofar as the
will takes hold of the idea and utilizes it in the actual production of creation. Again, Doolan
notes, “…knowledge directs an effect, but it is by means of a command of the will that the effect
is determined to exist or not to exist. It is for this reason that not all of the divine ideas are
exemplars but only those that are productive.”96 Doolan here leans upon article 4 of question 19
in the Prima Pars wherein Aquinas writes, “Consequently, they [effects] proceed from Him after
the mode of will, for His inclination to put in act what His intellect has conceived appertains to
93 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra gentiles, III, 17, at DHS Priory, www.dhspriory.org/thomas/. 94 Anderson, The Cause of Being, 154-155. 95 Doolan, Divine Ideas, 157. 96 Doolan, Divine Ideas, 157-158.
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the will. Therefore the will of God is the cause of things.”97
On the Thomistic view, then, the proper and principal object of God’s will is the divine
essence itself and its eminent goodness, and the divine exemplars insofar as they are productive
and imitative of this same goodness he possesses essentially. Creation is therefore the plenitude
of participated existence (esse commune) willed by God to be received individually in an
innumerable variety of creaturely essences possessed in God’s knowledge as divine exemplars,
each ordered to their own perfection and ultimately to God as their final end as the
communication of divine goodness.
The Perfection and Sameness of God
According to Aquinas, “…God wills himself and other things by one act of will.”98 That
God wills both himself and creation in a single act follows from Divine Simplicity (DS
hereafter), the doctrine pointing us towards God’s perfection and immutability. Aquinas makes
clear that God is most perfect in general99 and particularly emphasizes that God, in willing other
things, is not perfected thereby. In other words, there cannot be any perfections added to God’s
already perfect essence by his willing creation. On this, says Aquinas, “…the goodness of God is
perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no perfection can accrue to Him from
them….”100 In responding to objections as to whether God necessarily wills others things on
account of willing himself, Aquinas carefully qualifies: “Although God necessarily wills His
own goodness, He does not necessarily will things willed on account of His goodness; for it can
97 ST, I, q. 19, a. 4. 98 SCG, I, 76, trans. Pegis, 249. 99 See, e.g., ST, I, q. 4 and SCG, I, 28. 100 ST, I, q. 19, a. 3.
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exist without other things.”101 He writes thereafter, “…that God does not necessarily will some
of the things that He wills, does not result from defect in the divine will, but from a defect
belonging to the nature of the thing willed, namely, that the perfect goodness of God can be
without it….”102
The reason God cannot be further perfected by his willing of creation is that, as the very
cause of being and all things in every way they exist, he already possesses every perfection both
possible and actual—a cause cannot give or effect what it does not first have.103 As noted above,
Aquinas rightly concludes that no perfections can accrue to God from creatures because his
perfection is complete in himself with or without them. A fire heating something else is not
thereby made more perfect in its possession of heat by doing so, as the hotness it possesses in
itself is the same whether it causes heat in another. Similarly, God possesses all perfections
essentially and more eminently than found among creatures. Therefore, even more than is the
case with causality between certain created things, God willing the creation of these things with
all their own perfections cannot thereby add to and perfect him in any way. Wippel nuances the
same point: “An agent insofar as it is an agent is perfect. Because God is the first efficient cause,
the perfections of all things must preexist in him in preeminent fashion.”104
God remains essentially the same and identical whether willing this world, another, or
none at all in part because he is completely perfect and cannot be further perfected by creation.
We recall also that, unlike the human will, God’s will has only one object, namely his essence,
that is already wholly obtained from eternity. Additionally, God does not change with respect to
his substance nor, as was seen in the previous chapter, according to his knowledge. As Dodds
101 ST, I, q. 19, a. 3, ad. 2. 102 ST, I, q. 19, a. 3, ad. 4. 103 See ST, I, q. 4, a. 2. 104 Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 490.
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points out, these are the two ways Aquinas believes a change in the human will can take place
that are impossible with God: “First, something might become good for us through some change
in our disposition…Second, we might realize something is good for us through some change in
our knowledge. Since God is unchanging in both disposition (substance) and knowledge, his will
must be unchangeable.”105
God’s undivided single act of willing himself and creation, along with the inability to be
perfected thereby, seemingly safeguards his simplicity, immutability, and sameness regardless of
whether and what he wills. These attributes of God are essential to the Thomist conception of
God and rest on Aquinas’s apophatic methodology that removes from God all composition and
possibility of change. However, if God cannot change and wills as he does, does he therefore
will of necessity; is he free to create or not? We will look next at divine freedom and Aquinas’s
answer to this question.
Freedom of the Divine Will
Aquinas in several works considered hereafter anticipates issues related to divine
freedom insofar as he affirms that God is necessary and wills his own essence necessarily. The
problem arises because God wills from eternity and wills other things in necessarily willing
himself. Beginning in De veritate, Aquinas construes God’s freedom by contrasting its principal
and secondary objects, namely the divine essence and other things. On this, Aquinas writes,
The divine will has as its principal object that which it naturally wills and which
is a sort of end of its willing, God’s own goodness, on account of which He wills
whatever else He wills distinct from Himself…Hence the things which He wills
concerning creatures are, as it were, the secondary objects of His will…In regard
to that principal object, God’s goodness, the divine will is under a necessity, not
105 Michael J. Dodds, The Unchanging God of Love: Thomas Aquinas and Contemporary Theology
on Divine Immutability, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008),
171.
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of force but of natural ordination, which is not incompatible with freedom…It is
not, however, under any necessity in regard to any other object.106
Thus, God necessarily wills himself as the primary object and other things secondarily as ordered
to this end. There is no transfer of necessity from the former to the latter because the former is
complete and fully possessed so that no secondary means are needed for its attainment. In other
words, there is no direct and relevant similarity between a creation-level means-to-end causal
chain to attain an end and God’s willing of other things ordered to himself as their end.
Aquinas continues this same argumentation and develops the idea by adding an important
qualification highlighted earlier:
For God wills other things as ordered to the end of His goodness. But the will is
not directed to what is for the sake of the end if the end can be without it…Since,
then, the divine goodness can be without other things, and, indeed, is in no way
increased by other things, it is under no necessity to will other things from the fact
of willing its own goodness.107
Again, because the end, namely God’s own essence, is and remains the same with or without
creation, there is no intrinsic inclination in God’s nature to will anything other than the divine
essence. As seen previously, God’s goodness and perfection cannot be added to, so it is not
necessary that God will anything other than himself in order that this end be fully and completely
obtained. It is in this way that we see what Aquinas is aiming at when he says that God wills
things ordered to his goodness because creation itself is his goodness expressed, realized, and
participated in this or that way via his creative power.
Finally, in the Summa theologiae, the following passage presents the same position with
further considerations:
For the divine will has a necessary relation to the divine goodness, since that is its
proper object. Hence God wills His own goodness necessarily…But God wills
things apart from Himself in so far as they are ordered to His own goodness as
106 De veritate, q. 23, a. 4. 107 SCG, I, 81, trans. Pegis, 257.
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their end. Now in willing an end we do not necessarily will things that conduce to
it, unless they are such that the end cannot be attained without them…But we do
not necessarily will things without which the end is attainable…Hence, since the
goodness of God is perfect, and can exist without other things inasmuch as no
perfection can accrue to Him from them, it follows that His willing things apart
from Himself is not absolutely necessary. Yet it can be necessary by supposition,
for supposing that He wills a thing, then He is unable not to will it, as His will
cannot change.108
The import of this position is evident insofar as Aquinas establishes that there is no necessity in
willing something that brings about the attainment of an end unless without it the end remains
unobtained. Should the end be attainable through various means there exists a non-necessary
openness to the way in which the end may be actualized. Formally, the argument can be
expressed by the following syllogism:
(1) All things necessarily willed absolutely are those things necessary for the end to be
attained.
(2) No things God wills other than himself are those things necessary for the end to be
attained.
(3) Therefore, no things necessarily willed absolutely are things God wills other than
himself.109
For this reason, Aquinas holds that God is neither necessitated intrinsically to will creation by his
own nature nor extrinsically by any created thing, as these latter cannot contribute to any further
perfection of him and are not a necessary condition for God attaining the end of willing himself.
Finally, in a separate and complementary line of argumentation focusing on the
transcendent goodness of God, Aquinas states,
…when the end is proportionate to the things made for that end, the wisdom of
the maker is restricted to some definite order. But the divine goodness is an end
exceeding beyond all proportion things created. Whence the divine wisdom is not
so restricted to any particular order that no other course of events could happen.
Wherefore we must simply say that God can do other things than those He has
done.110
108 ST, I, q. 19, a. 3. 109 Thanks to Matt Fig, Ben Bavar, Omar Fakhri, and Daniel Vecchio for their helpful comments on
earlier constructions. 110 ST, I, q. 25, a. 5.
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What Aquinas seems to have in mind here is that when the end is proportionate to the things
required for its attainment there exists an inherent restriction on the freedom of the maker given
this proportionality. So, for example, if the end in the intention of the maker is a butcher knife
there exists the inherent restriction of its material constitution—chefs everywhere would
doubtless be perturbed to find a knife in their kitchen made from fabric—and accompanying
accidents such as size, shape, and so forth which are commensurable to the end of the intended
knife itself. By contrast, the divine goodness is a transcendent end fully exceeding the merely
participated goodness of creatures. As such, there is no restriction placed on God whereby he is
necessitated to will this or that world-order given the complete incommensurability existing
between the end, God himself, and the things of creation ordered thereto.
According to the Thomistic position, then, God is entirely free in his willing of creation
for the reasons specified above. However, given Aquinas’s strong view of DS and the Thomistic
commitment thereto, an apparent problem arises should one affirm that God exists necessarily,
wills eternally, cannot be perfected, is immutable, and wills himself and creation in a single act.
As such, two objections related to this problem will be addressed in an attempt to see why such
problems are not insurmountable on the Thomistic account.
Objections
The first objection supposedly follows from an affirmation of the conjunction that God is
immutable by way of DS and free to will other than he in fact did when creating this particular
world. Dodds presents the common objection in this way: “Some contemporary theologians have
concluded that since God chose to create this world rather than some other, he must now be
‘different’ from what he ‘might have been’ had he chosen otherwise. But if choice entails a
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difference in God, God must be changeable.”111 The problem is straightforward insofar as an
affirmation of DS and immutability precludes the possibility of God changing or being other than
he is, paired with the notion that each act of willing, a decision, causes a difference in God
himself.
A similar type of argument for this same objection takes root in God’s knowledge of the
contingent things he has willed to create and an affirmation of DS. Explaining the issues is
Grant:
Now, assuming that God is omniscient and there are contingent truths, it follows
that God has Contingent Knowledge [CK: God knows some contingent truth]. But
one might assume that God’s knowing some contingent truth, T, implies
something intrinsic to God, such as God’s belief that T, or perhaps just God’s
state or act of knowing T. What’s more, one might suppose that such states would
not exist were God not knowing T.112
According to Grant the complication arises because God exists necessarily and, given the
commitment to DS and its denial that the divine essence is anything other than God himself,
nothing intrinsic to God is anything other than the divine essence. Thus, the objector argues,
these contingent entities or states of knowing are intrinsic to God and lead either to a
contradiction where something contingent is identified with what is necessary, namely the divine
essence, or the undesirable conclusion that God is not entirely immutable.
The most effective response begins by first following Grant in rejecting what he refers to
as the Knowledge Thesis (KT): “Necessarily, God’s knowing some truth T implies some entity
intrinsic to God that would not exist were God not knowing T.”113 To do this, Grant proposes
adopting one of three separate models or a combination thereof. What Grant refers to as the
111 Dodds, The Unchanging God of Love, 171-172. 112 W. Matthews Grant, “Divine Simplicity, Contingent Truths, and Extrinsic Models of Divine
Knowing,” Faith and Philosophy 29, no. 3 (2012), 255. 113 Grant, “Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing,” 255.
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Immediate Cognition Model (ICM) appears most promising and consistent with Aquinas’s own
approach. According to ICM, “…God has acts of knowing consisting in relations to the
contingent realities known.”114 Grant continues: “God’s knowledge of contingent reality is
unmediated in the strongest sense possible…God’s cognitive state, his act of knowing, extends
out beyond God to embrace the contingent things in themselves, and those contingent realities, in
turn, directly inform God’s acts of knowing.”115
Recall that on the Thomistic view God’s knowledge and will are the very cause of things
whereas with human knowing things are the cause of knowledge. Concerning the latter there
exists a dependency relation of the human knower on the thing known—where what is known is
ontologically prior and comes to the knower from outside—culminating in the adequation of the
two in a single cognitive act intrinsic to the knower. By stark contrast, God is the cause of his
own knowledge insofar as he both knows and wills creation—the divine essence itself as
imitable—in a single unified act. Thus, he is the cause of his own knowing and what is known,
and stands ontologically prior to what is known in what was referred to above as an unmediated
knowledge. In other words, God does not stand in a dependency relation of knower-to-known
where what is known comes to him from outside as is the case with human knowers. Rather, God
causes what is known and thereby actualizes the one-way dependency relation of an effect to its
cause denominated extrinsically that results in no change in God himself.
In highlighting the following two positions, Lonergan provides further support for the
response: (1) creation is predicated of God by extrinsic denomination; and (2) no real change
occurs in the agent qua agent. Aquinas admits extrinsic denomination when discussing
114 Grant, “Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing,” 266. 115 Grant, “Extrinsic Models of Divine Knowing,” 266.
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predications made of God on the basis of relation and does so specifically as regards creation.116
With respect to (1), Lonergan writes, “God is immutable. He is entitatively identical whether he
creates or does not create. His knowledge or will or production of the created universe adds only
a relatio rationis [mental relation] to the actus purus [pure act]. They are predications by
extrinsic denomination.”117 Unpacking extrinsic denomination, Lonergan states,
Denomination is extrinsic to the subject if the correspondence is had by reason of
an entity that is outside the subject. Thus the proposition ‘The fire warms me’ is
an extrinsic denomination of the subject ‘fire’; for this proposition is true not by
reason of the heat that is within the fire nor the heat radiating from the fire, but
solely by reason of the heat from the fire and in me; and the heat that is in me is
not in the fire…the presence in me of heat from the fire gives rise to two true
propositions, namely, ‘The fire warms me’ and ‘I am warmed by the fire.’
Accordingly, whenever there is an extrinsic denomination there are propositions
that are simultaneous in truth, namely, a proposition that is true by extrinsic
denomination, and another proposition stating that the extrinsic denominator
exists.118
Creation is denominated extrinsically of God as a relation because “as action and passion
coincide as to the substance of motion, and differ only according to diverse relations, it must
follow that when motion is withdrawn, only diverse relations remain in the Creator and in the
creature.”119 And, as Aquinas observes,
…when a thing is attributed to someone as proceeding from him to another this
does not argue composition between them, as neither does action imply
composition with the agent. And for this reason…there can be no movement in
relation: since without any change in the thing that is related to another, the
relation can cease for the sole reason that this other is changed. Thus it is clear
with regard to action that there is no movement in respect of action except
metaphorically and improperly speaking, just as we say that one who passes from
inaction into action is changed: and this, would not be the case if relation or action
signified something abiding in the subject.120
116 See, e.g., ST I, q. 6, a. 4; SCG, II, 13-14. 117 Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 105. 118 Bernard Lonergan, Early Latin Theology, trans. Michael G. Shields, ed. Robert M. Doran and H.
Daniel Monsour (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), 267. 119 ST, I, q. 45, a. 2, ad. 2. 120 Thomas Aquinas, De potentia, q. 7, a. 8, at DHS Priory, www.dhspriory.org/thomas/.
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Thus, with the two terms of Creator and creation, and no motion involved, it follows for Aquinas
that we are left only with a diverse relation between the two of cause and effect.
With respect to (2), Lonergan highlights the view of action as a formal content and
articulates Aquinas’s conclusion: “…on the Thomist view action is a formal content attributed to
the cause as causing…the objective difference between posse agere [able to act] and actu agere
[to actually act] is attained without any change emerging in the cause as such.”121 Coffey, on
both extrinsic denomination and the denial of change in an agent qua agent, clarifies further:
…while the quality of heat is an absolute accident in a body, the action whereby
the latter heats neighboring bodies is no new reality in the body itself, and
produces no real change in the latter, but only gives it the extrinsic denomination
of heating in reference to these other bodies in which the effect really takes
place.122
Emerging from the foregoing considerations is that the first objection may be sufficiently
answered with resort to an extrinsic model of God’s knowledge paired with the view that
creation is predicated of God by extrinsic denomination and that, as an agent—indeed the
ultimate and primary agent par excellence—God does not undergo any change in himself by
bringing about the effect of creation but only a new relation.
The second objection, as with the first, is driven by a perceived problem with affirming
DS and a voluntary act of creation. DS entails that all that is in God just is God, and that
whatever is in God exists of absolute necessity. Mullins presents the objection—what he calls the
Modal Collapse (MC) argument—in this way:
On divine simplicity God’s essence is identical to His existence. Also, God’s one
simple act is identical to His essence/existence. God’s act of creation is identical
to this one simple act, and so identical to God’s essence/existence. God exists of
121 Lonergan, Grace and Freedom, 72. 122 Peter Coffey, Ontology or the Theory of Being: An Introduction to General Metaphysics (New
York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1914), 239.
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absolute necessity. So His act of creation is of absolute necessity since it is
identical to His essence/existence.123
Should the argument succeed, Mullins rightly concludes: “…there is no contingency for
everything is absolutely necessary…It is not possible that things be any other way.”124 As before,
the objection can be successfully met through the following considerations.
As a standalone response, one can follow Tomaszewski and claim that the argument is
invalid as is by formulating it thusly:
(1) Necessarily, God exists.
(2) God is identical to God’s act of creation.
(3) Necessarily, God’s act of creation exists.125
Tomaszewski explains,
…the argument from modal collapse is invalid, and indeed commits a fallacy that
has been well known since at least Quine 1953: Ch. 8. It substitutes ‘God’s act of
creation’ for ‘God’ into a modal context (within the scope of a necessity operator,
to be exact), but as Quine teaches us, modal contexts are referentially opaque,
which means that substitution into them does not generally preserve the truth of
the sentence into which such a substitution has been made.126
A similar argument, repeated here by Tomaszewski, has been put forth by Quine to demonstrate
why such substitutions are invalid: “…while it is necessarily true that 8 is greater than 7, and it is
true that the number of planets = 8, it is false that the number of planets is necessarily greater
than 7.”127 Thus, MC is invalid for precisely the same reason the example argument from Quine
is, namely that the substitution requires the second premise be necessary when it is not.
Should the proponent of MC insist that ‘God’s act of creation’ is necessarily identical to
God, and this because the act in toto is said to be identical to God’s essence—recalling that God
123 Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 138. 124 Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 138. 125 Christopher Tomaszewski, “Collapsing the Modal Collapse Argument: On an Invalid Argument
against Divine Simplicity,” Analysis (forthcoming), 3, at https://doi.org/10.1093/analys/any052. 126 Tomaszewski, “Collapsing the Modal Collapse Argument,” 3. 127 Tomaszewski, “Collapsing the Modal Collapse Argument,” 3-4.
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exists of absolute necessity—a modal collapse does indeed follow. However, as Tomaszewski
rightly notes, “…‘God’s act of creation’ designates that act, not how it is in itself, but by way of
its contingent effects.”128 Here, Tomaszewski furnishes the requisite first step for the twofold
approach to a sufficient response.
To begin with, ‘God’s act of creation’ is an ambiguous term and it is unclear how Mullins
intends it to be understood. As Joyce reminds us, “When, therefore, we ask, what is the act of
creation, our question may signify: What are we to conceive in God as being the immediate
principle of his creative activity? or: What is the effect immediately issuing from God as actually
creative?”129 As will become clear, Mullins’s failure to clarify the meaning of the term, and to
specify which question his argument is aimed at and answering, is largely responsible for much
of the obfuscation that renders MC sound in the latter instance and unsound in the former.
Writing elsewhere, Mullins says: “Given divine simplicity, all of God’s actions are
identical to each other such that there is one divine act.”130 Actions can be either immanent or
transeunt,131 and as with any transeunt action, motion, event, or happening, there is both the
cause and the effect, or what might also be referred to as the action of an agent and the passion of
the patient/recipient. Commenting on this division as it concerns the terms of predication is
Wippel:
…in the case of action, that from which the name is taken is said to be intrinsic to
the subject insofar as the subject is viewed as a principle…And in the case of
being acted upon (passion), that from which the name is taken is in some way
intrinsic to the subject which is acted upon…it explains why in the first case we
can assign action to a given subject, as when we say “Socrates is making a table.”
At the same time, we can say that the corresponding passio is realized in the
128 Tomaszewski, “Collapsing the Modal Collapse Argument,” 6. 129 Joyce, Principles of Natural Theology, 352. 130 Mullins, The End of the Timeless God, 139. 131 For a good discussion of these, particularly Aquinas’s view of transeunt causation, see Gloria
Frost, “Aquinas’ Ontology of Transeunt Causal Activity,” Vivarium 56 (2018), 1-36.
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material subject from which the table is being made, as is implied when we say
“A table is being made by Socrates.”132
Should MC employ the term ‘God’s act of creation’ to signify or designate the action of God as
the principle whereby he creates—the terminus a quo of the act—then this is indeed nothing
other than God’s essence. Thus, the identity statement between ‘God’s act of creation’ qua
principle of action and God’s essence holds—both are strongly rigid designators133—and is
entailed by simplicity without leading to a modal collapse. The reason for this is straightforward:
the identity statement between God and his principle of action signifying the divine essence itself
entails nothing with respect to any particular effect it may or may not bring about, just as a fire’s
act of heating qua principle whereby it heats signifies the form of fire and nothing with respect to
any particular nearby body it may or may not be heating.
If, however, MC uses the term ‘God’s act of creation’ to signify or designate the action of
God as the effect produced thereby—the terminus ad quem of the act—then the identity
statement does not hold, for this is just to beg the question in favor of the very conclusion that
the actual world, the effect of the principle whereby God acts, is necessary and thus signifies a
strongly rigid designator; a claim that is merely asserted and never argued. There is here an
important distinction to be made in the argument between an agent, A, and its action when
referring to ‘A’s act of x’ or the ‘action of A.’ Generally, as seen with Joyce’s question above,
‘action’ can signify (i) the agent, or the-subject-from-which, (ii) the effect, or the-subject-to-
which, or (iii) the event as whole without separating out (i) and (ii), and MC only succeeds if one
132 Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 223. 133 Something is said to be a strongly rigid designator if it designates a necessarily existent thing, i.e.
designates the same thing not only in worlds in which the thing exists, but in all possible worlds. For
more on rigid designators see Joseph LaPorte, “Rigid Designators,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, at plato.stanford.edu.
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uses the term ‘God’s act of creation’ to signify either (ii) or (iii) as a strongly rigid designator,
something Aquinas does not do and that is not entailed by DS.
Before moving to the second portion of the response to MC it will beneficial to briefly
articulate Aquinas’s reasons for identifying God’s active potency, action, and power with the
divine essence and substance itself, so that when speaking of ‘God’s act of creation’ one can
affirm the identity statement without the concern of a modal collapse. First, Aquinas maintains
throughout the corpus of his works134 that in all created things active and passive potency, action,
and operation, while grounded in form, are separate from essence and substance because all
created things are composites of act and potency.135 Because God is his own essence and
existence no such division of his being takes place, thus he is fully in act and his active power,
action, and operation are wholly of and through himself.
Second, and following from the first consideration, every created thing owes its principle
of action qua form and power thereof to God, thus the operation and activity of a created thing is
had derivatively and not wholly of itself.136 By contrast, God, whose essence is his existence,
receives nothing from without and operates wholly of himself with nothing else presupposed. As
Aquinas explains,
…everything which is through another is reduced to that which is through itself,
as to that which is first. But other agents are reduced to God as first agent.
Therefore, God is agent through His very self. But that which acts through itself
acts through its essence, and that by which a thing acts is its active power.
Therefore, God’s very essence is His active power.137
134 See, e.g., ST, I, q. 54, a. 3; q, 77, a. 1.; SCG, II, 8. 135 See ST, I, q. 77, a. 1. 136 For Aquinas’s explication of the ways in which God works in and through created causes, see ST,
I, q. 105, a. 5 and De potentia, q. 3, a. 7. 137 SCG, II, 8.
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Here, unlike creatures, God is fully is capable of non-derivative activity whereby his essence is
the very principle of his active power.
Finally, and again unlike creatures, God’s causality is in the order of being and substance
itself. Aquinas writes, “Creation does not mean the building up of a composite thing from pre-
existing principles; but it means that the ‘composite’ is created so that it is brought into being at
the same time with all its principles.”138 Creaturely action presupposes, among other things,
derivative power from God as mentioned above, in addition to extrinsic substances upon which
to act. Here, creaturely active power presupposes something other with its passive potency and
receptivity for action, thus creaturely action is always the giving of an accidental form to some
already existent thing. By the starkest contrast imaginable, God’s proper effect is the very
absolute being of anything whatsoever and the mode in which it is. Thus, Aquinas states, “Now
among all effects the most universal is being itself: and hence it must be the proper effect of the
first and most universal cause, and that is God.”139 God alone by his essence is both the sufficient
and necessary cause of a truly creative act, hence Wippel: “The only agent which can produce a
substance directly and immediately through its own essence or substance is one that acts through
its essence; in such an agent there will be no distinction between its essence and its active
power.”140
The second portion of the response is facilitated by adopting Brower’s Truthmaker
Account (TA) interpretation of intrinsic predication and abstract reference as regards DS.
138 ST, I, q. 45, a. 4, ad. 2. 139 ST, I, q. 45, a. 5. 140 Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas, 286.
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Accordingly, TA states, “If an intrinsic predication of the form ‘a is F’ is true, then a’s F-ness
exists, where this entity is to be understood as the truthmaker for ‘a is F.’”141 Brower continues:
According to the truthmaker interpretation, God is identical with the truthmakers
for each of the true (intrinsic) predications that can be made about him. Thus, if
God is divine, he is identical with that which makes him divine; if he is good, he
is identical with that which makes him good; and so on in every other such case.
Now, since nothing can be regarded as identical with anything other than itself,
this interpretation just amounts to the claim that God is the truthmaker for each of
the predications in question.142
As we’ve seen above, ‘God’s act of creation’ is best understood as the principle of God’s action
and as an intrinsic predication is identical with that which makes the principle what it is, namely
the divine essence or God himself. As with any of the divine attributes given Brower’s
truthmaker interpretation, God himself serves as the truthmaker for predications not only with
respect to the principle of his act of creation but also his essence, existence, act, and so forth,
each of which just is God. Thus, MC does not follow, for in every instance of ‘God is F’—where
‘God is his act of creation’ is such an instance—God serves as the truthmaker for every
predication, identical to them all just as he is identical to himself, and this always in reference to
the divine essence or substance itself. It is only when several of the premises leading to MC
remain ambiguous—or the terms are used equivocally—that the argument leads to the unwanted
conclusions of its purveyor.
Summary
An accurate articulation of God’s willing of creation begins with fundamental notion that
the proper and primary object of God’s will is himself, his own goodness. It on this account that
141 Jeffrey E. Brower, “Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” Faith and Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2008),
17. 142 Brower, “Making Sense of Divine Simplicity,” 19.
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God necessarily by nature wills his own goodness as an end—an end, it must be mentioned,
which is already attained. Because this end is already attained, and because God is perfect in
himself where no further perfections can be added to him from without, he is able to
conditionally will other things as directed to this same end without any resulting change in
himself, protecting both his freedom and Aquinas’s view of DS. Thus, while this particular
world-order is necessary by supposition,143 the following general schema may serve to facilitate
the correct view of God’s act of willing creation:
God necessarily wills → God’s Goodness (end) ←→ Freely wills C₁
God necessarily wills → God’s Goodness (end) ←→ Freely wills C₂
God necessarily wills → God’s Goodness (end) ←→ Freely wills C₃
In each instance, God necessarily wills his own goodness—an end attained—and freely wills all
other things ordered to this same end in what is best understood as a sharing of the divine
goodness. That God’s goodness can be participated in and reflected in a myriad of expressions
represents not a diversity in the divine essence itself but, rather, the diversity of ways in which
God’s free will is able to direct back to itself goodness as actually possessed by existent things.
CHAPTER THREE: THE RELATION BETWEEN GOD AND CREATION
God’s creation of the world out of nothing—what is often termed creatio ex nihilo—may
rightly be considered a change in the qualified sense when one understands and takes note of the
difference between that which was from that which now is.144 However, for Aquinas, creation is
properly understood as a relation, specifically a relation of cause and effect, or Subsistent Being
Itself and that which is referred to it, i.e. common being or ens commune. This, Aquinas says, is
143 See ST, I, q. 19, a. 3 for Aquinas’s important discussion on the distinction between absolute
necessity and necessity by supposition. 144 See ST, I, q. 45, a. 2, ad. 2.
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because of what was looked at previously, namely that creation signifies God’s creative act
insofar as it the very cause of universal being, the coming-to-be of being totaliter from absolute
non-being.
As to why creation is to be viewed as a relation, Aquinas writes,
But in creation, by which the whole substance of a thing is produced, the same
thing can be taken as different now and before only according to our way of
understanding, so that a thing is understood as first not existing at all, and
afterwards as existing. But as action and passion coincide as to the substance of
motion, and differ only according to diverse relations, it must follow that when
motion is withdrawn, only diverse relations remain in the Creator and in the
creature.145
Because action and passion correspond to the two terms of one motion, and because there is
nothing pre-existing corresponding to passion as that which is receptive of God’s creative act,
motion itself is thereby removed and what simply exists is the relation between Creator and that
which is created. It is this absence of motion that places God and his creation into a relation, and
specifically why Aquinas rightly rejects the idea that creation is an instance of motion or change.
By stating that creation belongs properly in the category of relation, it is prudent to articulate
both Aquinas’s general view of relation and the nuance of the type of relation creation in fact is.
Aquinas on Relations
In every relation there exists both the subject and the term, or that which is related and
that to which it relates. Clarifying is Owens:
Since subject and term are at opposite ends of the relation, they may in a certain
sense be both called its terms (extrema). The subject is in this respect the term (a
quo) from which the relation proceeds, and what is called simply the term is in
contrast that to which (ad quem) the relation is directed. If either is lacking, the
relation cannot exist.146
145 ST, I, q. 45, a. 2, ad. 2. 146 Joseph Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1994), 185.
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Aquinas recognizes three types of relation: (1) logical or those of reason, (2) real, and (3) mixed
or non-mutual.147 With respect to (1), Aquinas states, “Sometimes from both extremes it is an
idea only….”148 Relations of this type follow solely from the ordering of terms by an act of
reason. Regarding (2), Aquinas says, “Now there are other relations which are realities as regards
both extremes…,”149 and this because there is a mind-independent reality belonging to both
terms or extremes of the relation, as for example relations consequent upon either quantity or
action and passion, viz. cause and effect. Finally, Aquinas writes concerning (3): “…sometimes a
relation in one extreme may be a reality, while in the other extreme it is an idea only.”150
According to Aquinas, this type of relation occurs “whenever two extremes are not of one
order.”151
For Aquinas, relation is an ordering of a thing in reference to another, and he states this
view as follows: “…relation in its own proper meaning signifies only what refers to another.”152
Expounding, Henninger writes, “The ratio of relation is to be toward another (ad-aliquid). The
ratio of any relation is, as Thomas says, a respect to another, a condition of passing over to
another.”153 In all three instances in which relations can be present, each involves a towardness
or ordering of the two terms, one in reference to the other.
In distinguishing real relations and those only of reason, Henninger observes,
The difference between a real relation and relation of reason can be grasped in
terms of their respective causes. A relation of reason is caused and depends for its
147 For a more detailed treatment, see Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, V,
lect. 17, trans. John P. Rowan (Notre Dame, IN: Dumb Ox, 1995). 148 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7. 149 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7. 150 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7. 151 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7. 152 ST, I, q. 28, a. 1. 153 Mark Gerald Henninger, “Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations,” Journal of the History
of Philosophy 25, no. 4 (1987), 498.
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existence on the activity of some mind. A real relation is caused and depends for
its existence on some real extra-mental foundation in the subject of the relation.154
Noting the three necessary components of a real relation is Coffey: “For a real relation there
must be (a) a real, individual subject; (b) a real foundation; and (c) a real, individual term, really
distinct from the subject.”155 Continuing, Coffey says, “A relation is real in the fullest sense
when the extremes are mutually related in virtue of a foundation really existing in both.”156 For
Aquinas, real relations exist between two really distinct, extra-mental things, and a real
foundation possessing what Henninger refers to as a dual aspect or function.157 This dual aspect
of the foundation is grounded in an accidental form inherent in the subject which gives rise to its
real relation to the term. For example, Peter’s quantity given as the measurement of a certain
height, say 6-feet-tall, is the same accident by which the foundation for a real relation to another
person or thing of the same height is grounded. Important to note, however, is that there is no
fourth ontological thing possessing real existence arising from the relation itself.
Providing a concise summary of Aquinas’s view of relations of reason as laid out in De
veritate, q. 1, a. 5, ad. 16, Owens writes,
St Thomas lists four ways in which a relation of reason is occasioned: 1) because
the two terms coincide in reality; 2) because the subject of the relation is itself a
relation; 3) because in a mixed relation the relation is really in only one of the
terms; and 4) because the relation bears upon a term that has no real existence.158
Relations of reason are precisely those that come into being by an act of reason, an intellectual
operation imposing itself on the order of reality having no extra-mental reality of their own.
Coffey’s definition is succinct: “Logical relations are those which are created by our own
154 Henninger, “Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations,” 499. 155 Coffey, Ontology, 341. 156 Coffey, Ontology, 341. 157 Henninger, “Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations,” 505. 158 Owens, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics, 188, n. 29.
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thought, and which can have no being other than the being which they have in and for our
thought.”159 Such relations include those of ordering concepts in the mind into intelligible
groups, referring to an individual thing as identical with itself in some way as if it were two
things, articulating a relation between ‘being’ and ‘non-being’ where non-being is understood as
a term, and the relation between the second intentions of genus and species.160
Where mixed or non-mutual relations are concerned, there exists a relation between two
terms where only in one is there a real foundation. The result is that the relation is real in only
one of the terms while it is of reason, or logical, in the other. Such, for example, is the relation
between a man (real) and the pillar he stands to the right or left of (logical), or between the
knowledge one possesses of an object (real) and the object itself (logical). In these and all other
cases of mixed relations, each term is of a different ontological order and/or exists in an
asymmetrical dependency, and thus there is no mutual foundation for a real relation. Aquinas
holds that the relation between God qua Creator and creation itself is precisely of this kind.
God and Creation as a Mixed Relation
For Aquinas, the relation between God qua Creator and creation is understood as a non-
mutual or mixed relation. This, Aquinas writes, is for the following reasons:
Because in all those things that are referred the one to the other, the one
depending on the other but not conversely, there is a real relation in the one that is
dependent, and in the other there is a logical relation, as in the case of knowledge
and the thing known…Now the creature by its very name is referred to the
Creator: and depends on the Creator who does not depend on it. Wherefore the
relation whereby the creature is referred to the Creator must be a real relation,
while in God it is only a logical relation.161
159 Coffey, Ontology, 338. 160 See ST, I, q. 13, a. 7 and De potentia, q. 7, a. 11. 161 De potentia, q. 3, a. 3.
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Recalling that, for Aquinas, real relations require a mutual real foundation, and because there is
an asymmetrical dependency between God and creation—creation depends wholly on God while
God depends in no way on creation—we see that the relation between the two cannot but be
mixed.
In addition to a mutual real foundation, Aquinas also notes that real relations share in the
same ontological order, as for example in the case of quantity between two corporeal things.
However, in the case of God and creation, there is no—and, indeed, cannot be—mutual share in
the same ontological order. As previously mentioned, God is Subsistent Being Itself (ipsum esse
subsistens) while creation is, in its most fundamental notion, a participation of being, esse
commune, limited in varying degrees via essences and wholly dependent. Aquinas highlights this
as another reason why the relation between God and creation is mixed:
Since therefore God is outside the whole order of creation, and all creatures are
ordered to Him, and not conversely, it is manifest that creatures are really related
to God Himself; whereas in God there is no real relation to creatures, but a
relation only in idea, inasmuch as creatures are referred to Him.162
The complete absence of sameness or univocity in the order of being is why Aquinas holds that
the relation between God and creation is mixed, as not only is there no mutual foundation
possible, but in only one term, viz. creation, does a real dependency of being exist while in the
other, viz. God, no dependency, change, or accrual to its being takes place.
That there cannot but be a mixed relation between God and creation is principally
founded upon God’s complete transcendence of the created order. Elucidating this position,
Dodds writes,
Since the creative act is in no way common to God and creatures, there is no
common order of motion between them. For this reason the relationship between
them, unlike the relationship between a natural agent and its effect, cannot be a
real relationship with respect to both extremes. It is real in the creature (which
162 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7.
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really depends upon God as the cause of its being) and a relation of reason only in
God (who is not of the same order as the creature). In the creature, creation
signifies a real relationship to God as the principle of its existence. In God, it
signifies the divine action that is God’s substance along with a relationship of
reason to the creature.163
God is in no way common to creatures and the reality as regards the nature of causal activity is
that God alone is responsible for the very act of being simpliciter while creaturely activity
presupposes things as already existing. This distinctive aspect of God’s causal activity and its
relation to creation is nicely summarized by Anderson: “The relation of creation is that of total
dependence in being: it is unique; no other effect-cause relation is that of total dependence in
being, simply, absolutely. Every effect depends upon its cause, but created being alone depends
upon its Cause for its very being as such.”164
What is further defined by the shape of Aquinas’s account of a mixed relation between
God and creation is yet another affirmation of the overall scope of his Theology Proper insofar as
God is the ultimate and fully transcendent Principle par excellence. As a result of this view,
however, two main objections are raised centering on the concern that God, not being really
related to creation, is therefore a complete foreigner at a distance too wide for us to cross in order
to affirm anything truthful or meaningful about him.
Objections
The first objection stems from the notion that if God is related to creatures only by reason
and is unaffected by them, he is essentially static and removed from genuine relationship, a view
that runs roughshod over religious doctrines of God’s love for creation, particularly mankind.
Using Hartshorne as an example, Stokes expresses the concern in this way:
163 Dodds, The Unchanging God of Love, 167. 164 James F. Anderson, “Creation as a Relation,” New Scholasticism 24, no. 3 (1950), 281.
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His criticism of the traditional theistic view of this relation is that it regards God
as somehow indifferent to persons and to the interrelations of things; it regards
God as being what He is eternally, whether He creates this world or no world at
all; it regards Him, not as a subject or person, but as a thing, not conceived at all
with relations to persons.165
And yet, even as he is adamant that God is related to creation in reason only, Aquinas affirms
that in God there is love and that he loves all things.166
This objection, however, suffers from an equivocation by using relation and relationship
interchangeably. Relation, understood in its metaphysically-rich context as Aquinas’s
development of an Aristotelian category, is arrived at through careful reasoning as to its nature,
particularly in how it should be nuanced according to the various ways in which things are said
to be related to one another.167 By contrast, relationship is most often understood in terms of how
things relate once the relation has been properly identified. For example, in identifying the
mutual familial relation of father and son in its ontological context, we can then further articulate
how the activity within a father-son relationship takes place. Accordingly, Dodds states, “When
we say God has no real relation to creatures, we do not imply that he is remote or that there is no
relationship at all between him and creatures.”168
In affirming that God is related to creation only by reason, this is not to say that God has
no relationship to that which is really related to him, and thus that there is no interpersonal
connectedness. Here, then, the objection under consideration takes only the category of relation
into account while ignoring the relationship thereof. Additionally, it prescinds from the very
165 Walter E. Stokes, “Is God Really Related to this World?” Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association 39 (1965), 145-146. 166 See, e.g., ST, I, q. 20, a. 1-2; SCG, I, 90-91. 167 See Henninger, “Aquinas on the Ontological Status of Relations,” in particular §7. 168 Dodds, The Unchanging God of Love, 168.
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reason this type of relation is arrived at in the first place, namely the radical otherness of God
qua Creator and the dependency of creation itself. On this, Dodds is especially insightful:
To say that God’s relation to the world is of reason only cannot mean that God is
distant from the world since our whole purpose in making such an assertion is to
preserve God’s immanent presence and activity in creation. Nor does our
assertion mean that God has no influence on creation or that or that God’s
influence is merely imaginary, since the assertion is made precisely to preserve
and affirm God’s influence as the cause of being.169
It is precisely, as Dodds notes above, God’s causing of being as such and immanence throughout
all creatures by his power that God is most intimate and innermost in his creation. Contrasting
this notion and that of distance, Aquinas writes,
No action of an agent, however powerful it may be, acts at a distance, except
through a medium. But it belongs to the great power of God that He acts
immediately in all things. Hence nothing is distant from Him, as if it could be
without God in itself. But things are said to be distant from God by the unlikeness
to Him in nature or grace; as also He is above all by the excellence of His own
nature.170
Thus, to hold that God is distant, removed from, or indifferent to creatures because he is not
really related to creation is to grossly misunderstand the notion of relation in its most precise
ontological meaning while simultaneously overlooking the presence of God in all of creation in a
sense more connected than that which could ever attain between creatures.
The second objection finds itself couched in the view that all relations must add some
accident to the being of the subject in some way via adherence or participatory property
exemplification. For example, in their discussion of creation and the question of God’s relation
to a temporal world, Craig and Moreland make the following claim:
According to Aquinas, while the temporal world does have the real relation of
being created by God, God does not have a real relation of creating the temporal
169 Michael J. Dodds, “Ultimacy and Intimacy: Aquinas on the Relation between God and the World,”
in Ordo Sapientiae et Amoris: Hommage au Professeur Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P., ed. Carlos-Josaphat
Pinto de Oliveira (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires, 1993), 225. 170 ST, I, q. 8, a. 1, ad. 3.
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world. Since God is immutable, the new relations predicated of him at the
moment of creation are just in our minds; in reality the temporal world itself is
created with a relation inhering in it of dependence on God.171
Continuing, they write, “…instead of God existing alone without the universe, we have a
universe springing into being at the first moment of time possessing the property being created
by God, even though God, for his part, bears no reciprocal relation to the universe made by
him.”172 Finally, after concluding that Aquinas’s view “is extraordinarily implausible,”173 we
read: “‘Creating’ clearly describes a relation that is founded on something’s intrinsic properties
concerning its causal activity, and therefore creating the world ought to be regarded as a real
property acquired by God at the moment of creation.”174
Perhaps the most evident miscue made with this objection is the idea that if there is no
real relation, and thus no real property or accident acquisition in the subject, that there is
therefore no corresponding reality and possibility of true predication. This, of course, is denied
by Aquinas, particularly as it relates to God and divine names predicable consequent to the
creative act. In broaching this very issue, Aquinas states,
…God is related to the creature for the reason that the creature is related to Him:
and since the relation of subjection is real in the creature, it follows that God is
Lord not in idea only, but in reality; for He is called Lord according to the manner
in which the creature is subject to Him.175
God really is Creator, Lord, Savior, and so forth, not because of some real intrinsic change, but
because creation was brought into existence by him, is subject to him, and can be redeemed by
him; the truth of each predication depends entirely on the reality of the mixed relation as a whole
171 J.P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview
(Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2003), 559. 172 Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 559-560. 173 Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 560. 174 Moreland and Craig, Philosophical Foundations, 560. 175 ST, I, q. 13, a. 7, ad. 5.
61
and not on the acquisition of some property God did not possess before. Thus, contra Moreland
and Craig, God in reality is related to creation as the Creator even as this predicament carries
with it no newness in God himself but is wholly on the side of creation’s dependency. Explaining
is Aquinas: “Now, certain relations are predicated of God anew; for example, that He is Lord or
Governor of this thing which begins to exist anew.”176 Aquinas clarifies how this is understood:
Having proved that these relations have no real existence in God, and yet are
predicated of Him, it follows that they are attributed to Him solely in accordance
with our manner of understanding, from the fact that other things are referred to
Him. For in understanding one thing to be referred to another, our intellect
simultaneously grasps the relation of the latter to it, although sometimes that thing
is not really related.177
Elsewhere, Aquinas makes a similar observation against the claim that the relationship of
Creator to created is not reciprocal:
Whenever two things are related to each other in such a way that one depends
upon the other but the other does not depend upon it, there is a real relation in the
dependent member, but in the independent member the relation is merely one of
reason—simply because one thing cannot be understood as being related to
another without that other being understood as being related to it.178
Simply by the fact that a relation is mixed it does not follow that the relation is therefore not
reciprocal unless one takes reciprocity to be mean sameness in all respects—a costly
metaphysical commitment if ever there was one. Every relation of any kind has a subject and
term—reciprocity of reference—and thus to know and understand one is to know and understand
the other even if the relation is mixed and real in only one of the extremes. Recalling from
chapter two the discussion of extrinsic denomination, we see that this is precisely the type of
denomination that takes place in predicating divine names of God that signify relations and not
the divine essence itself.
176 SCG, II, 12. 177 SCG, II, 13. 178 De veritate, q. 4, a. 5.
62
The general thrust of the objection seems to rest on the view that the activity of every
agent, including God, results both in an intrinsic change in the agent and the acquisition of a new
property or accident given its relation to the effect. As previously discussed, God is the only
agent who acts by his own essence and undergoes no intrinsic change in the creative act—
indeed, there is no change in creation whatsoever, but the coming-to-be of creation from
complete non-being. The resolution rests therefore on whether relational changes within a mixed
relation denominated extrinsically carry with them the acquisition of a new property in the
subject. Noting again the example of knowledge to something known, it’s clear that my
knowledge of a thing, say a tree, and the relation between us that now holds in no way alters,
changes, or otherwise affects the tree; the relation is entirely asymmetrical and dependent on my
actual knowledge of the tree. Articulating this same idea with respect to God, Duby writes,
The former [absolute attributes] are identical to God’s essence considered
absolutely (though still under diverse aspects), while the latter [relative attributes]
are identical to God’s essence considered in relation to the creature under some
aspect or creaturely circumstance. God does not undergo change so as to accrue
the relative attributes as accidents; rather, the creature undergoes change, taking
up a new relation to God and thus meeting the same divine essence in new
ways.179
For the same reason we would deny that the tree acquires the property of being known by me—
though we do affirm the mixed relation that holds and predicate of each term accordingly—we
deny that God comes to acquire the property of creating the world even as he is in reality its
Creator. The newness is entirely on the side of the creation that now is, and not some change that
has taken place in God.
Summary
179 Duby, Divine Simplicity, 205.
63
Aquinas holds that creation is properly understood as a mixed relation between God and
creatures. Aquinas says this is so for the following reasons:
For what is made by movement or by change is made from something pre-
existing. And this happens, indeed, in the particular productions of some beings,
but cannot happen in the production of all being by the universal cause of all
beings, which is God. Hence God by creation produces things without movement.
Now when movement is removed from action and passion, only relation
remains….180
With God as the very cause of being, and without anything presupposed in the creative act but
the divine essence itself, all motion is removed and what emerges is the real relation of creation
dependent God. The relation is non-mutual or mixed given the asymmetry of dependency—
creation is wholly dependent upon God while God in no way depends on creation—and the fact
that there is no common ontological order between God and creatures upon which a mutual real
foundation can be established.
While God is related to creation by reason only, it does not follow that he is thereby
precluded from relationship, indifferent, or distant from his creation; indeed, nothing could be
further from the truth. Additionally, in predicating divine names of God signifying diverse
relations to creation—names such as Lord, Creator, and Savior—we do not thereby intend to
imply an acquisition of new properties or accidents in God himself. Articulating this important
position is Goris:
In reality, however, the divine essence does not depend on the creature, nor does
it change. The creature depends on God and changes. For there would be no
creature if it were not created and no person would be justified if not by God, but
God would still be God—though not Creator or Saviour—had he not created the
world or justified any human being. The dependence and the change signified by
these names, apply to God only as a consequence of our way of understanding
Him and naming Him (relatio rationis tantum), while they apply to creatures also
as a consequence of the way they are (relatio realis).181
180 ST, I, q. 45, a. 3. 181 Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God, 27-28.
64
Thus, God really is the Creator because creation now exists as the terminus of the divine creative
act, though he undergoes no intrinsic change whatsoever and acquires nothing new other than
predicable divine names based upon the reality of creation itself and this mixed relation.
CONCLUSION
For Aquinas, understanding God’s creative act is essential to the Christian faith, a
complete knowledge of divine truth, the edification of believers, a robust doxology of praise,
worship, and admiration of the Divine Artisan, and for refuting the myriad errors related
thereto.182 The author’s desire is that this particular study is worthy of consideration as support in
all of these important respects. We’ve seen that the Thomistic position on God’s creative act
takes for its starting point the immaterial aspect of knowledge and considers God as that which is
eminently immaterial and therefore all-knowing. God’s knowledge, particularly of his own
essence as imitable, is understood to be the very cause of any and all things. This knowledge is
possessed by God is his eternity and properly divided into that of simple intelligence and vision,
and nothing, created or merely possible, is hidden from it.
From there, God’s will is understood as that which attaches to the divine knowledge and
is thereby productive of creation via the divine essence itself. The formal object of God’s will is
nothing other than the divine essence itself and his own goodness, and it is in willing his own
goodness that God wills all other things as directed thereto. Given the non-necessity of God’s
willing of anything other than himself, creation is rightly said to be the free, gratuitous act of
God sharing his goodness. In willing creation God remains simple, perfect, immutable, and
entirely a se.
182 See SCG, II, 1-3.
65
Finally, because God’s creative act brings creation from non-being to being in all its
fullness and does so without any motion or change, creation is properly understood as a relation,
specifically a non-mutual or mixed relation. This relation exists where a subject and term are
related but there is an asymmetrical dependency and uncommon ontological order between the
two where no real mutual foundation is present. Thus, in only one of the terms—in this case
creation itself—is the relation real while in the other, namely God, it is merely a logical relation
or relation of reason. For Aquinas, this position allows for the changing of creatures within the
created order and permits the predicability of divine names to God as relative attributes, all while
safeguarding God’s simplicity and the absolute divine attributes.
Given the foregoing philosophical investigation into God’s creative act as developed and
articulated by Aquinas, we are now in the unique position of more adequately appreciating the
systematic, coherent, comprehensive, and beautifully-interconnected depth of the Thomistic
approach to creation and all its important corollaries and accompaniments. Additionally, by
addressing some of the more popular and pressing objections to Aquinas’s views, we have seen
that they may be sufficiently answered and refuted without compromising any essential
positions. With both in place, it is my hope that the preferability of the Thomistic account has
been satisfactorily demonstrated. Soli Deo gloria.
66
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