To Aristotle, act is a principle of things, not a thing itself. This means that act is a source of the concrete things we experience in the world.
Now, we experience different kinds of things in the world, physical things, living things, conscious things, and intelligent things.
Physical things are marked by being interactive, meaning that they move while being moved, during their operations. Furthermore, their operations and structures seem to have no intristic purpose. Physical things don’t act for themselves, or for anything else: they just operate.
Life introduces a principle beyond the mere physical, life introduces a structure or organization that its parts exist in relation to and are used by, with operations that are initiated by the living thing itself, and for the sake of the living thing itself. In other words, unlike physical things, living things have some sense of interior.
Consciousness adds onto this the sense of interior operation. Mere living things exist within themselves, but animals integrate with the appearances of things outside themselves into themselves.
Intelligence drives deeper still, for intelligence seeks communion not merely with appearances, but with the very interiority of other things. This is what we mean by personal relationships.
I outline this to point out that, as we see from moving up this ladder of transcendence, beings develop a greater interior life with a deeper immanent operation. Physical things don’t have a self, living things have a basic sense of self, conscious beings are selves in the world, and intelligent beings are selves that seek to dwell within each other.
If we follow this reasoning, we begin to see that, at the extreme of being, pure act, is the deepest and greatest sort of interiority and immanent operation. This is why, after Aristotle proves the existence of pure act, he immediately says pure act is perfect intelligence and happiness, a complete self: it simply follows directly from his understanding of what act is, which I’ve tried to explain above.
So, rather than being some unchanging rock, pure act is perfect operation: it is unchanging not because it is static, but because it is dynamic, because it is perfect, complete, without which nothing else can be added. And yet because it is so perfect, it seeks to share itself with others, to the point of creating other selves in order to do so.
If my heart changes, it would be to stop beating and I would die. But my heart doesn’t change, it beats, and I am alive. So, rather than unchanging meaning a rock that is stationary, it means more a perfect heart, and one seeking to share its beats with others. God then is like the rich man who shares all his wealth, in this case, his perfection, intelligence, happiness, power, life, his very self. with us poor (so poor that everything we are is from God). We call this grace.
Christi pax.
