“Now I realize that Aristotle’s God is supposed to not stand in subject-object relations to us; and that Aquinas followed Aristotle, I guess, in saying that God isn’t “really related” to creatures, knows about us indirectly, as it were, by contemplating His own essence that somehow mirrors everything else (without this essence itself being related to these other things??!! Wow! Does it just “happen” to reflect them?). But I can’t make anything of this. It sounds like an attempt to get Christian theology into line with Aristotelian orthodoxy. I don’t know why one would feel obliged to stick by this, unless one were Catholic and took very seriously the papal injunctions to follow Thomas on everything…but I have plenty of serious Catholic colleagues, fans of St. Thomas, who have to admit that at some points the reconciliation of Aristotle that Thomas tried to carry off just doesn’t work (and, post-Vatican II, I don’t think Catholic theologians are required to stick this close to St. Thomas on every point; but I could be wrong). This looks to me to be one of the places where the synthesis just doesn’t work.”
