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.

1

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/.

2

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.

3

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.

5

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.

6

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.

7

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.

8

(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.

9

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.

10

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.

11

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.

12

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.

13

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.

14

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.

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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.

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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

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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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