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Dr.Bonnette
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Thank you, Linus.
Those are extremely insightful and pertinent notes by Dr. Massey,
I shall be interested to see how you and others on this thread dissect them. You could write a virtual book doing so!
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Linusthe2nd
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And if you do, we will read it
. What impressed me so was: first, that this syllabus shows that serious study of Thomas is taking place even in secular institutions and, second, it demonstrated the intensity with which the course was taken - it certainly wasn’t for the faint of heart. Only real scholars could survive that course.Linus2nd
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thinkandmull
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So the ideas of God are different from His essence and we emanate from them?
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thinkandmull
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Another question: does Aquinas assume or prove that the **Final **destination of intellegent creatures must be the **First **Cause.
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Linusthe2nd
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I don’t he proves it philosophically, rather this is a matter of Faith and Divine Revelation. Thus, it would be a theological topic.
Linus2nd
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Linusthe2nd
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I have to disagree here. If you read chapter 44, 1 Thomas says " as we have proved above. " Now he is not referring merely to the " proofs " for the existence but to the entire Aristotelian corpus upon which these are based, especially " Physics, " Metaphysics," " De Anima, " and " Ethics " especially. I think that if one backtracks from the " proofs " one will find specific answers, that he is not merely illustrating a point of philosophical theory. One can of course follow A. through Thomas’ Commentaries. This is what makes 44-2 so interesting and challenging.
Linus2nd
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Dr.Bonnette
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Because of God’s absolute simplicity, the divine ideas are identical to His essence. Simplicity means that in God there is no distinction between substances or parts or principles.
Creatures simply do not “emanate” from God at all as an “outflowing” from the divine being. As I said earlier, it is not a matter of taking a part of God and putting it into creation. God, as the Infinite Being, simple posits the creature into existence in virtue of His own power, acting through efficient causality which produces the creature while involving no change whatever in the Creator.
The term, “emanate,” denotes something coming out of a source, as a part coming forth, which is entirely wrong. God causes a creature and remains utterly other than that which He creates, and is distinct from it as a cause is distinct from its effect.
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thinkandmull
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If it we don’t come out of God, then God takes nothing and makes it into something, something hardly even intellegable, even to an almighty power. I don’t see any middle ground
Linus, doesn’t Aquinas assume that the perfect precedes the imperfect. Where is the proof that the first mover isn’t irrational and leads to an intellegent lover at the end of time?
Linus, doesn’t Aquinas assume that the perfect precedes the imperfect. Where is the proof that the first mover isn’t irrational and leads to an intellegent lover at the end of time?
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thinkandmull
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Also, does the vertical cosmological argument rest on the belief that there can’t be an actual infinity? Aquinas says there can’t be an actual infinity newadvent.org/summa/1007.htm#article4, but says there is an actual infinity of points on a life and an actual infinity of thoughts in God, and there can be an infinity of accidental causes in past time horizontally, but not vertically. Very confusing.
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thinkandmull
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*newadvent.org/summa/1046.htm
Reply to Objection 7. In efficient causes it is impossible to proceed to infinity
“per se”–thus, there cannot be an infinite number of causes that are “per se”
required for a certain effect; for instance, that a stone be moved by a stick, the
stick by the hand, and so on to infinity. But it is not impossible to proceed to
infinity “accidentally” as regards efficient causes; for instance, if all the causes
thus infinitely multiplied should have the order of only one cause, their
multiplication being accidental, as an artificer acts by means of many hammers
accidentally, because one after the other may be broken. It is accidental, therefore,
that one particular hammer acts after the action of another; and likewise it is
accidental to this particular man as generator to be generated by another man; for he
generates as a man, and not as the son of another man. For all men generating hold
one grade in efficient causes–viz. the grade of a particular generator. Hence it is
not impossible for a man to be generated by man to infinity; but such a thing would
be impossible if the generation of this man depended upon this man, and on an
elementary body, and on the sun, and so on to infinity. *
So this Aquinas contradicts Himself in these two links I’ve given. And the part I put in bold at least suggests he is speaking of horizontal eternity. I see the cosmological argument vaguely, but it is intuition. Not something that would convince an athiest
Reply to Objection 7. In efficient causes it is impossible to proceed to infinity
“per se”–thus, there cannot be an infinite number of causes that are “per se”
required for a certain effect; for instance, that a stone be moved by a stick, the
stick by the hand, and so on to infinity. But it is not impossible to proceed to
infinity “accidentally” as regards efficient causes; for instance, if all the causes
thus infinitely multiplied should have the order of only one cause, their
multiplication being accidental, as an artificer acts by means of many hammers
accidentally, because one after the other may be broken. It is accidental, therefore,
that one particular hammer acts after the action of another; and likewise it is
accidental to this particular man as generator to be generated by another man; for he
generates as a man, and not as the son of another man. For all men generating hold
one grade in efficient causes–viz. the grade of a particular generator. Hence it is
not impossible for a man to be generated by man to infinity; but such a thing would
be impossible if the generation of this man depended upon this man, and on an
elementary body, and on the sun, and so on to infinity. *
So this Aquinas contradicts Himself in these two links I’ve given. And the part I put in bold at least suggests he is speaking of horizontal eternity. I see the cosmological argument vaguely, but it is intuition. Not something that would convince an athiest
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Dr.Bonnette
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St. Thomas offers philosophical proofs, which are not merely a matter of faith or divine revelation.
See C. G. III, 17, which it entitled: “That all things are ordered to one end who is God.” In paragraph 9, he concludes: “Therefore, the ultimate end is the first cause of all.”
Since intelligent creatures must be included in “all,” the last end of intelligent creatures must be the First Cause.
Moreover in chapter 25, St. Thomas argues, “That to understand God is the end of every intellectual substance.”
Since the modus operandi of the C. G. III is, de facto, philosophical demonstrations, these matters are offered to us by St. Thomas as conclusions of rational arguments, not faith or divine revelation.
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Dr.Bonnette
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It is not clear to me precisely which part of my post you are disagreeing with – the question about man being a first self-moving mover? … or that efficient causality is at work in 44.2?
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Dr.Bonnette
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It begins to sound to me as if you are conceiving being as something purely material, so that one must start with “something” in order to fashion it into something else. God neither takes a part of Himself to create something nor does he take some “nothing” and make it into “something.” Nothing is nothing, and you cannot make something out of “nothing.”
God is Pure Spirit. He creates by simply willing that a creature be. How? We are not God and thus do not understand the “process” in itself. But we can reason from His creatures back to His existence and nature and come to understand what creation means.
Frankly, this would be the subject matter of an entire course in metaphysics and natural theology, which I simply cannot take the time to present on this thread. If you look at the Aquinas School of Philosophy, where I give these courses (aquinasphilosophy.com), you will see that course CDs are available – and they consume many hours of presentation.
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thinkandmull
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I don’t see why there can’t be an infinity of efficient Cause. It is not the same thing to say “do these infinite things in order to produce this effect” and saying that there was an infinity of causes. Is this push is produced from another push, to infinity backwards, why could not it have just been that way, and they are all efficient in their own place in the chain. Isn’t a point with an inifinte line from it at least intelligable?
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Dr.Bonnette
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The so-called “vertical argument” (which is metaphysical, not cosmological) does not rest on the assumption that an actual infinity is impossible. It rests on the principle that the per aliud or per accidens necessarily implies the per se, which you could write a book on. I know because I did. See Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence (Martinus-Nijhoff: The Hague, 1972). There isn’t room to reprise it in this thread.
We know that an infinite regress of moved movers or caused causes is impossible, not because an infinite multitude in act is impossible, but because there must be a First Mover Unmoved in order for any intermediate movers to move (similarly for causes). Read the Prima Via in the S.T. carefully and you will see that that is what St. Thomas says. “But this cannot go on to infinity, because then there would be no first mover, and consequently, no other mover. seeing that the subsequent movers move only inasmuch as they are moved by the first mover…” Note that he does not say that there must be a first because you cannot go to infinity, but rather he says that you cannot go to infinity because there must be a first…
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thinkandmull
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But he admits you can’t prove there always was no first mover if the world was eternal
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Dr.Bonnette
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You repeatedly call this the “cosmological argument,” which is the Kantian terminology. Any proof that leads to God must be metaphysical in nature ultimately, since its conclusion transcends the order of ens mobile.
St. Thomas does not contradict himself. The per accidens causal regress described above goes back in time, and he admits that such a regress could go to infinity. But the causal regresses in the Quinque Viae are per se in nature, meaning any chain of causation operates in the here and now so that all intermediate causes are acting simultaneously in the transmission of the “thread of causation” passing through them. That is why he says in the Secunda Via that “to take away the cause is to take away the effect.”
A true proper cause must always be simultaneous with its effect.
I usually take a full class to explain this poorly understood principle fully. I believe I explained some of this in an earlier post. The problem is that examples often appear to betray the principle, since the imagination often assigns the wrong cause to the wrong effect. If you have the actual cause here and now producing its actual effect, and you remove that actual cause, the effect ceases to be. Try taking away God’s continuous creative causality sustaining you in existence – and see how long you last.
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Dr.Bonnette
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What did this sentence actually say?
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Linusthe2nd
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I phrased that poorly. I should have said that what Thomas meant isn’t certain. So we would have to backtrack to see if we could pin it down with greater certainty. Sort of like Fr. John A Weisheipl disseceted his work, he left nothing to chance.
And if we consider that every being has a final end, there is no reason why we cannot consider man’s intellect as the mover of his will. Thus man is a self-moved mover and the first in respect to his person.
And if this argument harkens back to A’s celestial spheres, I don’t recall A as saying they were intelligent. Did he say they were intelligent? If they were moved by desire for God, it would seem they would have to be. But I don’t recall how A explained this. An argument against this is that Thomas was not all that certain that A was correct about his theory about the way the spheres were moved.
And one has to be aware that Thomas tends to give A perhaps more credit than he deserves at times. Here I have in mind the proof that he gives from efficient causality. I remember reading Thomas’ reference to A on this point and to me it seemed that A was speaking only about changes in the " imperfect world, " not celestial spheres. A was convinced in an eternal world and if I remember right he rejected creation as a cause of anything ( just going from memory). So that would bring that proof into question as far as being from Aristotle.
P.S. I paid $140 for Weisheipl’s Nature and Motion in the Middle Ages. Got it out of the Neitherlands.
P.P.S. I have to read your comments above.
Linus2nd
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