All Given and All Received: Deus in se in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae

1. All Given and All Received: Deus in se in Aquinas’ Summa theologiae For the Program in Classical Philosophy, Princeton University November 5th 2013 Wayne J. Hankey Department of Classics, Dalhousie University and King’s College, Halifax

2. The metaphysics of Pure Beingin St Thomas’ Summa theologiae Very being itself [ipsum esse subsistens] is real, not notional, giving [dare] and receiving [accipere] of itself to itself. This giving and receiving of infinite being forming three infinite subsistences, makes understandable, though not by a compelled necessity, the emanation of finite beings, what religion calls creation. Thomas’ thearchy unrolls and rewinds by way of linked concentric circular motions ever more inclusive of otherness until the Summa theologiae, if completed,would have described even the encircling of evil within the mone, proodos, epistrophe of Thomas’ tripartite system of God, the human, and Christ as the man-God. The circular motions returning upon themselves are of diverse kinds, and we must map them and their connections, but by far the most important are those which Aquinas deduces from the Proclean logic of simple substance. From the Liber de causis and Dionysius, he knows this has perfect self-return and, in consequence, is, by the absolute necessity of its nature, knowing and willing. These two operations, processions or emanations—the terms are used more or less interchangeably by Aquinas for whom emanation was a Scriptural term—are internal to the divine essence.

3. The metaphysics of Pure Beingin St Thomas’ Summa theologiae By employing the notion of motionless motion, through which the Neoplatonists reconciled Plato and Aristotle at their greatest difference, Aquinas is able to attribute the characteristics of Plotinian NOUS to Aristotle’s (and his own) God as self-thinking thought and to predicate life of it. However, motionless motion is a metaphor for Aquinas—he always refuses to apply the proper Aristotelian physical motion to God—nonetheless, the divine self-diremption must be real. Thus we get “Et licet motus non sit in divinis, est tamen ibi accipere.” [ST 1.42.1 ad 3]. Accipere and its correlative dare are essential to the logic of infinite esse as the form under which it is or contains the relation of opposites. Such a relation is real, the differentiation of the essence in the opposition of action and reception is real, and thus, within the divine simplicity, the two relations of this kind must form subsistences or hypostases, called persons in religious language.

4. The parts of this paper • Reasons we should look at Thomas’ metaphysics of infinite being as including the whole fundamental structure of the Deus in se. • Why we are able to do so. • What prevents such an obvious reading. • A map of the logic of the Deus in se.

5. Thierry-DominiqueHumbrecht, O.P. Humbrecht’s two recent books treating the Deus in se and Aquinas’ Summa theologiae exhibit the institutional structures, the historical traditions, and the philosophical and theological aims and positions which separate thedeounofrom thedeotrinoin a way the Summa theologiae does not do. These prevent seeing their unifying logic . Théologie négative et noms divins chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 2005), 841 pages, is a dissertation directed by Olivier Boulnois, Directeurd’études, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Professeur , Institutcatholique de Paris, with Gilles Emery, Jean-Luc Marion, Remy Brague, Ruedi Imbach, and Alain de Libera on the jury. Théologie négative earned him a doctorate in Philosophy from the secular École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. It was succeeded by Trinité et création au prisme de la voie négative chez saint Thomas d’Aquin, Bibliothéque de la Revue thomiste (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2011) 788 pages. Trinité et création was written as Fr Humbrecht’s dissertation for the canonical doctorate of Theology at the Dominican University of Fribourg in Switzerland. It was supervised there by Gilles Emery, O.P., Ordinary Professor of Dogmatic Theology at Fribourg, with François-Xavier Putallaz, and Serge-Thomas Bonino, O.P. (of the Toulouse convent which publishes the Revue thomiste), on the jury, among other notable philosophical – theological scholars of St Thomas.

6. Mapping the Structure of the Ipsum Esse Subsistens, the Deus in Se of the Summa theologiae SecundumOrdodisciplinae (Prologus) The Summatheologiae as a whole and its parts describe self-related circles of Remaining (mone) Going-out (proodos, exitus) Return (epistrophe , reditus) by which all things come out from and circle back to their beginning, namely God. Three parts (Summa theologiae 1.2) God (de Deo) Human being seeking God (de moturationaliscreaturae in Deum) Christ (de Christo, qui secundum quod homo, via est nobistendendi in Deum) uniting the two, and thus bringing the human back to its source.

7. The Tripartite Structure of the de Deo De Deouno. What belongs to the essence of God (ad essentiamdivinam pertinent). Questions 2-26 De DeoTrino. What belongs to the distinction of Persons (ad distinctionemPersonarum). QQ 27-43 Together, these constitute the Deus in se. De DeoCreante. What belongs to the procession , or emanation, of creatures (ad processumcreaturarum) QQ 43ff . The De Deouno is tripartite Whether God is (an sit Deus) Q 1.2 In What way God is, or better, is not (quomodo sit, velpotiusquomodo non sit), QQ 3-13 What belongs to the operations of the divine essence (ad operationemipsius), QQ 14-26 Whether the subject of this science, God, is (De Deo an sit) is tripartite: Is God’s existence self-evident (per se notum)? ST 1.2.1 Can God’s existence be proved (demonstrabile)? ST 1.2.2: Utrum Deus sit (ST 1.2.3): The Five Ways to Knowing That God Is. Beginning with the perception of motion (sensuconstataliquamoveri in hoc mundo) and concluding with motion’s term in the final cause (omnes res naturalesordinantur ad finem) , the Quinqueviaehave a circular structure.

8. The Circle described by the names of the Divine Essence QQ 3-11

9. Aquinas’ Motionlessly Moving God The circle described by the move from Simplicity through multiplicity back to Unity is only the first of many circles describing God’s inner and outer life. The next ones concern how God circles upon himself in self-knowing and self-loving. They come after two questions: 1.12 How God is Known by Us, and ST 1.13 How God is Named by Us, followed by the internal operations of God, knowing and loving 1.14-18: God’s Knowledge, Ideas, Truth, Falsity and LifeST 1.18 God’s Life is where Aquinas explicitly applies motionless motion to God 1.19-21: God’s Will, Love, Justice and Mercy 1.22-24 God’s Providence & Predestination (the combination of knowledge and will) Operatio ad extra. 1.25: God’s Power Summary and transition. 1.26: God’s Happiness Beginning withST 1.27 The Processions within God and the Origin of Persons in God we get the Trinity, personal emanations within God based in his internal operations of Knowing and Loving. Scriptural revelation is necessary in order to know that there is real relation with the opposition in the essence of Giving and Receiving, Beginning withST 1.44 On the First Cause of all Beings we get the procession based on power which is outside God’s essence, the emanation of Creation. Here what receives is unequal to what gives (the divine essence united in the real subsistences) and the relation is not mutual but rather of creature to creator. In fact that unequal relation of dependence is what constitutes the creature as creature.

11. Excursus IThe Determining Principles in respect to Knowledge in the First • Simple subsistent being is without composition and cannot be affected from outside, in consequence the argument of the de deo shows it as self-determining and self-affected. The same holds for knowing which cannot be affected by what is outside it or below it. • The Aristotelian identity of knower and known: the form of what is known is the form of the mind of the knower. With the Peripatetics , I and II together prevent God’s knowledge of the world of material particulars. For Aquinas, should these principles prevail in this way, God could also not be their cause. • The Neoplatonic principle (with its logical basis in Porphyry at the latest) “a thing is received (or known) according to the mode of the receiver (or knower)”. Aquinas knows and uses this from the beginning of his writing. It comes to him early both from Boethius and the Liber de causis, so he does not think of it as Platonic rather than Aristotelian. This modifies the Aristotelian identity in such a way as to enable God’s knowledge of creation and is fundamental to the analogiaentisand the positive knowledge of God by us.

12. Excursus on the Determining Principles in respect to Knowledge Two things prevent III being sufficient to solve all the problems. a) If the First Cause is only knowing, and causes by knowing, then all it knows will necessarily exist. To prevent this the emanation of creatures requires will as well (Moses Maimonides, whose Guide of the Perplexed was well known to Aquinas, works out this problematic). b) The basis of the effect must be discernable in the cause in order for it to be known as cause. Ultimately, this requires the internal self-differentiation of Ipsum Esse Subsistens to which we are attending. Its concluding result is the giving and receiving which is the Trinity, and, as Trinity, is the cause of creation, so the necessary and natural emanations of knowing and willing are the origin of the voluntary emanation which is creation. We cannot exhibit the whole dialectic here but: 1) Aquinas maintains “the knowledge of God implies a relation to creatures as they are in God” (1.14.15), on the basis of principle II above, 2) the composition this introduced into God (although constantly denied by Aquinas on the basis of principle III above) is allowed , because, as he puts it, when discussing the ideas “the multiplication of the divine Ideas is not caused by things but by the divine essence comparing itself to things” [multiplicantur Ideae non causantur a rebus sed ab intellectu divino comparante essentiam suam ad res]. 3) By such reflective comparing, real differentiation is introduced into God by Aquinas (it is not merely our way of looking at God), he allows it as self-affectivity (a term I owe to Michel Henry).

24. Aquinas’ Motionlessly Moving and Self-Affecting God The view overall of Part I De Deo ST 1.1: The nature of Sacred Doctrine ST 1.2: Does the subject matter, God, exist. ST 1.3: God is Simple. ST 1.4: God is Perfect. ST 1.5 & 1.6: Goodness & God’s Goodness ST 1.7:& 1.8 God is Infinite and Exists in all things. ST 1.9 & 1.10: God is Unchangeable & Eternal. ST 1.11: God is One. ST 1.12 How God is Known by Us, and ST 1.13 How is Named by Us, then come the internal operations of God, knowing and loving ST 1.14 God’s Knowledge ST 1.15 God’s Ideas ST 1.16 Truth ST 1.17 Falsity ST 1.18 God’s Life ST 1.19 God’s Will ST 1.20 God’s Love ST 1.21 God’s Justice and Mercy… ST 1.22 ,23, 24 God’s Providence, Predestination and the Book of Life (knowing and loving together) ST 1.25 God’s Power ST 1.26 God’s Happiness Beginning with ST 1.27 The Trinity, personal emanations within God based in his internal operations of Knowing and Loving. Beginning with ST 1.44 On the First Cause of all Beings we get the procession outside God’s essence, the emanation of Creation. This is the great widening of the circle which ultimately returns to its origin through Part II On the Human seeking God and Part III on Christ the Union of both.

25. Excursus II (1) [excerpted and modified from my “Ab unosimplici non est nisi unum: The Place of Natural and Necessary Emanation in Aquinas’ Doctrine of Creation”] From Trinitarian self-differentiation to Creation Oportetprocessumemanationis a Deouniriquidem in ipso principio, multiplicariautemsecundum res infimas (Summa Contra Gentiles 4.1 Proemium) Commenting on the Liber de causis, Aquinas wrote: “not all things receive God’s goodness in the same mode and equally, but each according to the mode of its own potentiality.” This gives Thomas’ characteristically Platonic treatment of the emanation of creatures (the logical principles here are in the Timaeus). What proceeds out of God must be multiple, diverse, and unequal, only thus can what is outside the divine substance receive his goodness so that the universal order is both as good as it can be in itself and will also represent him as adequately as possible (perfectiusparticipatdivinambonitatem et repraesentateamtotumuniversum). Creation for Aquinas requires three emanations of two distinct kinds. First, there are the internal emanations or processions within the divine essence which produce real distinctions and relations within the Principle. These two emanations are necessary (necessitate absoluta – “with an absolute necessity” (Super Sent., lib. 1, dist. 6, q. 1, art. 1) and natural. They are emanations of the primary and most simple unities from the first and most simple unity, i.e., the emanation of the Word, which is the necessary and natural result of God’s knowing himself, and the emanation of the Spirit, which is the necessary and natural result of the divine self-love.

26. Excursus II (2) From Trinitarian self-differentiation to Creation Aquinas tells us in Summa contra Gentiles, that “by necessity it must be that God always knows himself,” that the necessary result of this self-knowledge is the “emanation” of the Verbum conceptum, note the passive voice, and that “it must be that he proceeds naturaliter from the Father” (ScG, 4.11). ConceptioVerbidivini est naturalis (ST, 1.41.2 ad 4). These emanations are natural precisely as determined; the natural is what is ordered to only one result (ST, 1.41.2: naturadeterminata est ad unum). If these processions were not necessary, but contingent so that they might or might not happen, what proceeds would be a creature, not a divine being. At De Potentia, 2.3, Thomas invokes Avicenna on behalf of this necessity in God: per se necesse est esse (at ST, 1.41.2 Avicenna is quoted without being named). The same necessity of the divine nature determines the emanation of the Spirit as love, and, as with the Son, it is necessary that what proceeds be equal to its principle (De Potentia, 10.2 ad 5). Equality as a characteristic is also especially appropriated to the Word as the first emanation from the Father who is the principle of the Trinitarian processions. Aequalitasautemimportatunitatem[...] Et ideoaequalitasappropriaturFilio, qui est principium de principio (ST 1.39.8).

27. Excursus II (3) “The first thing which proceeds from unity is equality and then multiplicity proceeds. And therefore, from the Father, to whom, according to Augustine, unity is proper, the Son processes, to whom equality is appropriate, and then the creature comes forth to which inequality belongs” (ST, 1.47.2 ad 2). The multiplication of equals is the origin of the other kind of emanation, that of “all being from the universal being” (ST, 1.45.4 ad 1). From his Commentary on the Sentences through all his writing, as Gilles Emery has established, for Aquinas, the procession of the Son is the cause and reason of all subsequent emanations: “les processions des personnessont la cause et la raison de la procession des créatures (dansl’exituscommedans le reditus).” The characteristics de la procession des créatures are contrary to those of the first kind. The necessary emanations within the divine determine the character of emanation outside it (ST, 1.45.5). This procession is voluntary, because the divine being is necessarily willing. Thomas’ position may be presented in words of Albert Magnus: “In the First, will and essence are the same. Thus, as the first invariable is in respect to essence, so also is the invariable according to will. It is, then, a consequence of the rule ‘from the simple one nothing comes except a unity,’ that, from a will which is not at all diversified by what it wills, there is nothing except unity. [...] Since, it follows that because [the First] knows himself as the principle of everything, he knows all which is, so also it follows that, because he wills himself as the principle of all things, he wills all which is.” (De causis et processu, 2.4.4.)

28. Excursus II (4) From Trinitarian self-differentiation to Creation  For Aquinas will is essential to creation. Because it is willed and not necessary, creation is not an emanation or a real relation within God. Rather it is a relation in the creature to God (ST, 1.27.1 ad 3; ST, 1.45.3). Because creation also originates in an intellectual principle (the divine self-love is a consequence of the divine self-knowledge), which, as intellectual is filled with all the forms, the order created is of multiple, diverse and unequal beings. Far from opposing necessary emanation which is determined by the nature of the principle, Aquinas incorporates it into the very life of God. By his situation at a conclusion of a debate among the Arabic Peripatetics, he is moved to separate necessary and free emanations. In a way we do not find among the Hellenic Neoplatonists, Aquinas places one within God, the other in his relation ad extra. Avicenna’s God as necesse esse, who produces his like out of the necessity of his nature, has a very exalted place in the Thomistic theological hierarchy. Aquinas acknowledges his debt to Ibn Sina, both directly and by quoting him. The divine Henads have an equal exaltation in Thomas’ divinity. Their manner of coming forth in the One is echoed in the ab unosimplici non est nisi unum and the procession of the divine Persons. The ex uno non nisi unum is most recognizable in the procession of the Verbum as aequalitas—an idea Aquinas credits to Augustine.

29. Excursus II (5) From Trinitarian self-differentiation to Creation The equality of the unities within the thearchy and the ordered unity of the divine being, whose knowing and loving are self-determinations by which the essence is given and received to itself, distinguish this Christian Neoplatonism both from its pagan and from its Islamic and Jewish predecessors. Thomas’ construction also differs in many ways from the Greek Christian Platonism of Dionysius on which he is so dependent. They all, however, disclose the necessities of the logic within which all are working. Thomas understands this logic better as his knowledge of Platonism grows, and he grants a place in his system to what of its necessities each of his teachers discloses.

30. Excursus III The movement within the Quinque Viae

31. Aquinas’ Five Ways to Knowing That God Is ST 1.2.3: The Five Ways to Knowing That God Is. The First Way, the one most evident and certain to us, is from the bare fact of motion. Sensing motion requires that there be the motionless to which is it compared, so, as Aristotle’s Physics concludes, the analysis of motion brings thought to the Unmoved Mover, God. The Second Way is from the existence of distinct things. These require an efficient or making cause, so the analysis of making brings thought to a first maker, God. The Third Way is from a fundamental difference between things as we experience them in thought and practice, some are necessary, some only possible (contingent). In both theory and practice the possible depend upon the necessary. Thus in the analysis of beings we come, by way of the first fundamental difference between things, to what is necessary through itself and gives necessity to others, God. This way owes much to Avicenna (Ibn Sina). The Fourth Way is from a second fundamental difference among things, namely, that we grade them, as greater and less, better and worse. All of these require a standard of comparison: the greatest, the best, the most beautiful, etc. This best or highest requires a cause; the cause of highest being, goodness, beauty, and so on, we call God. The Fifth Way is from purpose in things, that even things which do not know act to preserve themselves as individuals or as a species, for example.

32. Aquinas’ Five Ways to Knowing That God Is ST 1.2.3: The Five Ways to Knowing That God Is. The Fifth Way from purpose in things, continued: Aquinas argues here that to have purpose or intention in things which do not think requires an intelligence creating and moving nature, this, he says, we call God. Notice that we have arrived 1) at an articulated and ordered cosmos, 2) a cognition that can know it (moving from mere sensation to intelligence), such correspondence between self and object is at the centre of ancient and medieval understanding, 3) at a considerable knowledge of God. The interconnection of the physical, psyche, and divinity is also characteristic of ancient and medieval understanding. We have then, as well as a sensing, making, judging, and intelligently ordering knower, An Articulated and Ordered Cosmos: from mere motion, we came to things or substances, these were ordered first as necessary and possible (so for example, means and ends) and then as greater and less, better and worse; finally all were united into one teleological (purposeful) order of nature. A considerable knowledge of God. The Unmoved Mover becomes a Maker who is Necessary through itself, causes and is the standard of the greatest and best, and is the Intelligence which orders all things purposefully. Thus by the end of ST 1.2 we have come from Physics to cosmogony (a cosmos has come to birth in thought) and from both together to theology.

33. Order is of the Essence In my God in Himself (1987/2000) I compare Aristotle’s ordering of the four causes to that of Aquinas in the Summa. I excerpt (and modify) what I concluded on pages 141 & 142. “Thomas uses the causes to structure his writing only twice in the first forty-five questions of the Summa theologiae; in both cases he uses the same order. He places matter and form between the moving and final causes. Proper motion, as distinguished from activity generally, belongs to the material. When seen in relation to the divine causality, it involves a going out from simple immaterial being to matter which is raised to formal perfection as the good, or end, it lacks. In causing, God as the principle of all procession, i.e. the Father, knows the form by which he acts in [and as] the Son and loves the Son and himself as end in the Spirit. Thus understood, the order Thomas uses, in distinction from his sources in Aristotle, has a reason. The source of motion is the obvious beginning, just as its opposed cause, the final, is appropriate end… He says, glossing Aristotle, who also mentions their opposition, ‘motion begins from efficient cause and ends at final cause’ [In Meta. I.IV, 70]. ‘Prima autem et manifestior via est, quae sumitur ex parte motus.’ The moving cause is an obvious point from which to start the ways to God within a theology which also begins from him. Those ways ended: ‘Ergo est aliquidintelligens, a quo omnes res naturalesordinantur a finem, et hoc dicimus Deum’. But ‘intelligere et velle’ are motions as ‘actusperfecti’ and as such display the ‘rediens ad essentiamsuam’. This return is perfect in the divine being. Its exitusand reditusbecome fully manifest in the processions of persons founded in God’s activities of knowledge and love; these in turn make intelligible the procession and return of creatures.”

34. Excursus IV Motionless Motion: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas.

35. Aristotle 384-322 BCE History in Philosophy and the Activity of Intellectual Beings

36. Aristotle God’s Life as Activity Metaphysics XII.7 The first mover, then, exists of necessity; and in so far as it exists by necessity, its mode of being is good, and it is in this sense a first principle….On such a principle, then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. And it is a life such as the best which we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever in this state, which we cannot be), since its actuality is also pleasure. (And for this reason are waking, perception, and thinking most pleasant, and hopes and memories are so on account of these.) And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e. the essence, is thought. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain, and the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God; for the actuality of thought is life, and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good, so that life and duration continuous and eternal belong to God; for this is God.

37. Plotinus 204/5 -270 CE

38. Plotinus on the Life which is God’s Mind Plotinus 204/5 -270 CE although his “neoplatonism” as we have identified it since the 18th century is a synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, he derives his notion of the Mind of God from Aristotle. Ennead III. 2 Since we hold the eternal existence of the Universe, the utter absence of a beginning to it, we are forced, in sound and sequent reasoning, to explain the providence ruling in the Universe as a universal consonance with the divine Intelligence to which the Universe is subsequent not in time but in the fact of derivation, in the fact that the Divine Intelligence, preceding it in Kind, is its cause as being the Archetype and Model which the Universe merely images, the primal by which, from all eternity, the Universe has its existence and subsistence. The relationship may be presented thus: The authentic and primal Cosmos is the Being of the Intellectual Principle and of the Truly Existent. This contains within itself no spatial distinction, and has none of the feebleness of division, and even its parts bring no incompleteness to it since here the individual is not severed from the whole. In this Mind inheres all life and all intellect, a life living and having intellection as one act within a unity: every part that it gives forth is a whole; all its content is its very own, for there is here no separation of thing from thing, no part standing in isolated existence estranged from the rest, and therefore nowhere is there any wronging of any other, any opposition.

39. Ennead III. 2 Everywhere one and complete, it is at rest throughout and shows difference at no point; it does not make over any of its content into any newform; there can be no reason for changing what is everywhere perfect. …Such is the blessedness of this Being that in its very non-action it magnificently operates and in its self-dwelling it produces mightily. 2. By derivation from that Authentic Cosmos, one within itself, there subsists this lower Universe, no longer a true unity. It is multiple, divided into various elements, thing standing apart from thing in a new estrangement. No longer is there concord unbroken; hostility, too, has entered as the result of difference and distance; imperfection has inevitably introduced discord; for a part is not self-sufficient, it must pursue something outside itself for its fulfillment, and so it becomes the enemy to what it needs. … The Divine Intellect in its unperturbed serenity has brought the universe into being, by communicating from its own store to Matter: and this gift is the Reason-Form flowing from it. For the Emanation of the Intellectual Principle is Reason, [note that humans are reasoning, not intellectual beings] an emanation unfailing as long as the Intellectual Principle continues to have place among beings. The source of reason within a seed [its LOGOS] contains all the parts and qualities concentrated in identity; there is no distinction, no jarring, no internal hindering; then there comes a pushing out into bulk, part rises in distinction with part, and at once the members of the organism stand in each other's way and begin to wear each other down.

40. Ennead III. 2  So from this, the One Intellectual Principle, and the Reason-Form emanating from it, our Universe rises and develops parts, and they inevitably are formed into groups concordant and helpful in contrast with groups discordant and combative; sometimes of choice and sometimes incidentally, the parts maltreat each other; engendering proceeds by destruction. Yet: Amid all that they effect and accept, the divine Realm imposes the one harmonious act; each utters its own voice, but all is brought into accord, into an ordered system, for the universal purpose, by the ruling Reason-Principle. This Universe is not Intelligence and Reason, like the one above, but participates in Intelligence and true Reason: it stands in need of harmonizing because it is the meeting ground of Necessity and divine Reason—Necessity pulls towards the lower, towards the unreason which is its own characteristic, while yet the Intellectual Principle remains sovereign over it.  The Divine Intellectual Sphere alone is true Reason, and there can never be another Sphere that is nothing else except Reason; so that, given some other system, it cannot be as noble as that first; it cannot be Reason: yet since such a system cannot be merely Matter, which is the utterly unordered, it must be a mixed thing. Its two extremes are Matter and the Divine Reason; its governing principle is Soul, presiding over the conjunction of the two, and to be thought of not as labouring in the task but as administering serenely by little more than an act of presence.

42. Aquinas Reconciling Plato and Aristotle The Life of Intellectual Beings Motionless Motion For Aristotle, and for Aquinas following him, physical motion is the act of something which is imperfect. Evidently, the perfect God cannot move in this way. In the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas represents Plato as teaching that “God moves himself but not in that way in which motion is the act of the imperfect”. For him Aristotle teaches that perceiving and thinking are motions in the general meaning of the word, rather than in the specifically physical meaning of the word. In this way motion can include the act of the perfect. The result is to dissolve the difference between a first being which moves itself (according to Plato) and a first being which is unmoved (according to Aristotle).Aquinas found this interpretation of Aristotle and the notion of God’s activity as motionless motion in the Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Arabic commentators on Aristotle and in many other ancient sources. Aquinas supposed that Aristotle did not assert against Plato that knowing was different from motion, but that thinking was a different kind ofmotion.

43. Motionless Motion Commenting on Aristotle’s Psychology III, 7, 431a1 Aquinas says of perceiving that “if it be called motion, it is another kind of motion from that with which the Physics deals”: But this motion is the act of the perfect ... and therefore simply different from physical motion. Motion of this kind is properly called operation, e.g. sensing, understanding and willing, and, according to Plato, it is according to this motion that the soul moves itself, in so far as it knows and loves its own self. [For further see my “Aquinas and the Platonists” from which what I give here is excerpted, strongly modified.]

44. Summa Theologiae 1.18Life in God 1.18.1 It is clear that those things are properly called living that move themselves by some kind of movement, whether it be movement properly so called, as the act of an imperfect being, i.e. of a thing in potentiality, is called movement; or movement in a more general sense, as when said of the act of a perfect thing, as understanding and feeling are called movement. Accordingly all things are said to be alive that determine themselves to movement or operation of any kind: whereas those things that cannot by their nature do so, cannot be called living, unless by a similitude. 1.18.3 Life is in the highest degree properly in God. In proof of which it must be considered that since a thing is said to live in so far as it operates of itself and not as moved by another, the more perfectly this power is found in anything, the more perfect is the life of that thing. …Wherefore that being whose act of understanding is its very nature, and which, in what it naturally possesses, is not determined by another, must have life in the most perfect degree. Such is God; and hence in Him principally is life. From this the Philosopher concludes (Metaph. xii, 51), after showing God to be intelligent, that God has life most perfect and eternal, since His intellect is most perfect and always in act.

45. Summa Theologiae 1.18Life in God 1.18.3 Reply to Objection 1: As stated in Metaph. ix, 16, action is twofold. Actions of one kind pass out to external matter, as to heat or to cut; whilst actions of the other kind remain in the agent, as to understand, to sense and to will. The difference between them is this, that the former action is the perfection not of the agent that moves, but of the thing moved; whereas the latter action is the perfection of the agent. Hence, because movement is an act of the thing in movement, the latter action, in so far as it is the act of the operator, is called its movement, by this similitude, that as movement is an act of the thing moved, so an act of this kind is the act of the agent, although movement is an act of the imperfect, that is, of what is in potentiality; while this kind of act is an act of the perfect, that is to say, of what is in act as stated in De Anima iii, 28. In the sense, therefore, in which understanding is movement, that which understands itself is said to move itself. It is in this sense that Plato also taught that God moves Himself; not in the sense in which movement is an act of the imperfect.