Brief Commentary on Summa Theologiae 1, questions 2-4 Alfred J. Freddoso University of Notre Dame Question 2:  The Existence of God General comments:  At first the very posing of this question might seem strange.  After all, if we are taking our starting points at least in part from revelation, the existence of God seems certain.  Why, then, introduce arguments based on natural reason for God's existence?  What is the point?  Actually, there seem to be several points, some of which become evident as the question proceeds and others of which lie in the background. The first thing to notice is that St. Thomas is here using the name 'God' as a common name in what we might call the "Gallup poll" sense of God.  When people are asked by pollsters whether or not they believe in God, most say yes.  But by 'God' they seem to mean something like 'an ultimate principle of the universe' without much specificity.  Some might in addition think of God as personal or as in some way the source of the meaning of life, but just what this God is remains shrouded in darkness.  (A lot of people seem to accept the existence of God but are fearful of a God who might, say, interfere with their lifestyle.)  This is the broad sense in which St. Thomas uses the term here, although he means to show that a notion like 'ultimate principle of the universe' implicitly contains more than is first apparent.  Still, it is important to note that even after the proofs for God's existence, St. Thomas takes it to be necessary to argue further in question 3 that God is not a body, i.e., a material substance.  This shows that a philosophical proof for an Uncaused Cause or a First Efficient Cause or a Necessary Being, etc., is not in itself a proof of the existence of the sort of God revealed to Abraham or Moses.  In fact, in ST 2-2, q. 2, a. 2, ad 3, St. Thomas flat-out denies that non-believers believe that God exists and is such-and-such in the same sense that believers do.  The reason is that non-believers do not know God in the intimate way revealed through the act of faith in the articles of the Catholic Faith.  For instance, the best that non-believers can do is to prove the existence of God under some such description as 'First Efficient Cause' or, at best, 'Perfect Being'.  But this is to think of God in a way that falls far short of the doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, wherein God is seen in three persons:  Loving Father, Word Made Flesh, and Holy Spirit.  And so, St. Thomas concludes, "[Non-believers] do not truly believe that God exists, since as the Philosopher says in Metaphysics 9, when it comes to simple entities, the only defect in knowing them lies in not grasping them at all." This having been said, the question remains:  Why bother with the philosophical proofs?  One reason is that these proofs provide us with a philosophically sophisticated articulation of that natural understanding of God that is presupposed by divine revelation.  That is, God must communicate to us in a way that is adapted to our way of understanding.  And St. Thomas believes that our experience of the world triggers a natural wonder and desire for truth and goodness that we in some sense turn into an understanding of God, even if this understanding is woefully incomplete and, indeed, distorted in some crucial ways.  It is in this sense, for instance, that many pagan mythologies are a preparation for the Gospel -- at least the ones that haven't been completely corrupted.  (On this point, see Chesterton's The Everlasting Man, Part One, chaps. 4-8.)  So we are open to God's self-revelation in part because we sense that the world is mysterious and requires an explanation and, what's more, because we naturally seek to make sense of our lives within a broader cosmological framework. Consistent with this, the second purpose of the proofs is to provide us with certain names of God, derived from His effects, that allow us to give a systematic way of separating off literal from metaphorical Scriptural attributions of predicates to God.  This will become clearer as we proceed through question 3 on God's simplicity. 2,1:  Here St. Thomas rejects a priori proofs of God's existence like Anselm's ontological proof.  He is firmly convinced, rightly or wrongly, that our only natural access to God comes from sensory experience of the world outside us as God's effect.  (On St. Thomas's view, even our knowledge of our own minds and of our various cognitive and affective operations presupposes sensory experience of the world 'outside' us.)  Speaking at a very general level, this is part of St. Thomas's Aristotelianism, which grants a certain autonomy and importance to secondary (i.e., created) causes and the study of them.  (However, we will also see lots of Platonism as we go along as well.) St. Thomas makes a distinction between what is knowable per se in itself and what is knowable per se to one or another rational subject.  Per se knowability in itself is had by a proposition when the definition of its subject includes the definition of its predicate.  However, I know such a proposition per se only if I grasp that the definition of the subject includes the definition of the predicate.  In some simple cases we can assume that the two coincide for every normal human being who has reached the 'age of reason'.  For instance, we all know per se that a whole is greater than a proper part of it, but only a few of us know per se the per se knowable proposition that incorporeal beings do not exist in a place.  This is known per se only to those who are wise in the relevant respect. So, says St. Thomas, if we grasped the essence of God (or the real definition of God), we would know per se that God exists.  But in this life we are not wise in this respect -- only God and the blessed in heaven are.  Our present access to God is limited to knowing Him through His effects and not through His essence.  Therefore, 'God exists' is not known per se by us.  (Notice, by the way, that the knowledge we have in the theoretical sciences of the essences of physical substances includes, once again, many propositions that are per se knowable to the 'wise' in those sciences.  The difference is that such knowledge is at least in principle such that we (i.e., members of our species) can have it in this life.) What about St. Anselm's argument, then?  Here things get a bit murky.  St. Thomas's first reply is that not everyone uses the term 'God' in the way it is used in St. Anselm's argument, viz., to mean 'that than which a greater cannot be thought'.  However, this is not really an objection to the argument itself as it stands.  The second objection is that even if one does mean this by the term 'God', he does not thereby believe that such a being exists in reality outside of the intellect's apprehension.  This may be true enough.  But, to put it into St. Thomas's terms, Anselm's argument seems intended to make the gainsayer 'wise' with respect to the term 'God' taken in the relevant way.  That is, the fool who denies that there is a being than which none greater can be thought is shown by the argument to be like the 'fool' who denies that incorporeal beings do not exist in a place.  That is, the argument is meant to show the fool that he cannot consistently maintain that there is no being than which no greater can be thought.  So St. Thomas's objection seems to beg the question against St. Anselm's argument. Can St. Thomas's position be salvaged here?  Perhaps.  The key would be to understand the term 'God' in the Anselmian sense as merely a name that expresses the negation of imperfection rather than as a name that 'lays hold' of God's essence in the way that the name 'red oak tree' lays hold of the essence of a certain physical substance.  That is, the claim would be that our only grasp of the Anselmian definition is through the via remotionis, whereas Anselm's strategy is in effect to bypass the via remotionis and have an argument that yields up right at the beginning God as a perfect being.  So on St. Thomas's view, we can get to the concept of God as a perfect being only by beginning with Besides, if we cannot immediately deduce the properties of those physical objects whose essences we do have some limited cognitive access to, then wouldn't it  be astonishing if we were able to have a better grasp of God's essence?  (Interestingly, both Duns Scotus and Leibniz claimed that Anselm's argument works only if we have a separate proof that that the concept that than which a greater cannot be thought does not entail a contradiction.) 2,2:  Even though we cannot know a priori that God exists, we can still prove the existence of God a posteriori under certain descriptions.  The ideal scientific explanation is a demonstration propter quid, where we go from a theoretical understanding of essences as causes to various phenomenal effects.  However, even in natural science we must begin with the effects and then reason back to their causes.  Only in this way, perhaps aided by the construction of a theory, are we in a position to see the effects as emanating from their now understood causes.  (Think of explanations in chemistry, for instance.)  This second sort of reasoning is what St. Thomas, following Aristotle, calls a demonstration quia, which works from effects back to their causes.  This is the sort of argument that we use for God's existence.  More specifically, we use certain general truths about the natural world as starting points for arguments that reason back to God, under an appropriate description, as their cause.  This does not in itself give us knowledge of God's essence, except with respect to whatever it would take to cause the effect in question.  For instance, the First way of art. 3 reasons back to God under the description 'Unmoved Mover' or 'Actuality without Potentiality' as the ultimate cause of motion or change. 2,3:  I will not try to give a complete assessment of the arguments here.  Notice that each one gives us a description of God that coheres with some of the ideas people normally harbor about God:  The Ultimate Cause that is not Caused, the Necessary Being responsible for the existence of everything else, the Governor of the World, the best and most noble Being, etc.  St. Thomas thinks that these are ordinary conceptions of God and that, furthermore, there are strong arguments supporting these natural beliefs.  All mythologies reflect at least some of these arguments in one way or another.  But from these descriptions we have enough to give a philosophically sophisticated articulation of God's transcendence.  This is the burden of questions 3 and 4 especially, as well as of questions 5-11. A further point is this:  The First Way appears here in a somewhat truncated version when one compares it to the argument as it appears in the Summa Contra Gentiles.  This, I believe, confirms the view that the arguments function here mainly to link our natural inclination to think that there is an ultimate being of some sort to certain descriptions of God that will help us distinguish God from creatures in a philosophically robust way.  In the Summa Contra Gentiles, in contrast, St. Thomas's purpose is to give a complete version of the argument meant to obtain the assent of the Gentile philosophers. Notes on the First and Second Ways:  Notice that in these two ways, the hierarchy of causes are essentially rather than temporally ordered.  That is, these are not arguments for a temporal beginning of the world; in fact, St. Thomas in other places makes it clear that on his view the beginning of the world in time cannot be proved by natural reason.  Rather, these are arguments that are meant to show that any instance of change demands a simultaneously acting hierarchy of causes, and that this hierarchy must have an upper limit (an Unmoved Mover or First Efficient Cause) if any change is taking place at all.  This assumes that (a) every change requires an explanation outside itself (nothing moves itself from potentiality to actuality) in a being which is Pure Actuality and which hence is not itself acted upon, and that (b) the operation of any cause within the universe requires the simultaneous existence and operation of a transcendent First Efficient Cause, which acts but is not acted upon. One disputed question is whether or not these arguments depend on outdated Aristotelian physics.  Another way of putting the dispute is this:  Are these arguments physical arguments that depend on Aristotle's conception of the physical universe and its changes, or are they instead metaphysical arguments that transcend and are valid no matter what particular physical theory is correct?  I tend to think of them -- especially the Second Way -- in the latter sense.  This is especially true when we note that the arguments assume that the complete explanation for any change in the universe will take us to the deepest level of at least physical -- and in many cases chemical, biochemical, and biological -- explanation, so that one ultimate question will be:  Why are these the true theories in the relevant domains?  A note on the so-called 'quantifier fallacy' of the Third Way:  In the Third Way St. Thomas seems to reason as follows:  If everything is such that at some time it does not exist, then there is a time at which nothing exists.  Sharp commentators point out that this inference is invalid.  After all, it seems that one could have an everlasting succession of things that satisfied the antecedent, in which case the consequent would be false.  Now this is a pretty obvious point, and right away that should give one pause.  While St. Thomas is not infallible, he is pretty damn (well, blessedly) smart and likely not to make the simple error in question. So let's look at the argument a bit more closely.  First of all, the argument focuses at the beginning just on things that are subject to generation and corruption, and not all things that are possibly such that they exist and possibly such that they do not exist.  For instance, angels as St. Thomas conceives of them need not have existed, but they are nonetheless not subject to generation and corruption.  That is, they do not contain within themselves principles of generation or corruption.  This is why they are not subject to death.  So as far as this argument is concerned, they would, so conceived, count as necessary beings.  The same holds for the celestial bodies as Aristotle conceives of them (their matter being subject only to local motion and to no other form of change).  Interestingly, the same holds for primary matter, which is a principle of the generation and corruption of sublunar material substances but is itself not subject to generation or corruption according to Aristotle.  (How could it be?  What would it come from?) Now with this background in mind, take another look at St. Thomas's argument.  What he is arguing is that it is impossible for every being to be subject to generation and corruption.  Presumably, 'every being' includes the matter out of which material substances are composed.  Suppose that at some time this matter did not exist, either because it had not yet been generated or because it had been corrupted.  Since all material substances have this matter as a component, there would be no material substances after that time.  Furthermore, spiritual beings would either have their own matter and hence would be generable and corruptible, in which case the same argument would hold for them, or they would not be subject to generation or corruption and hence would not exist given the assumption that every being that actually exists is subject to generation and corruption.  Hmmm ..... it looks like maybe St. Thomas's argument is a bit stronger than it seemed at first.  In particular, while it might not in general be valid to argue that if everything is such that at some time it does not exist, then there is a time at which nothing exists, it might indeed be valid to argue that if there was ever a time at which everything -- and I do mean everything -- is such that it is subject to generation and corruption, then nothing exists now.  So there must be at least one necessary being.  At this point, the second half of the argument comes into play, trying to show that the fact that a being is not subject to generation and corruption is not sufficient to explain its existence.  Some necessary beings may indeed have their esse and necessity from another.  But this regress cannot go on to infinity.  So there is a necessary being whose esse and necessity do not derive from another.  "And this everyone calls God."  Note, though, that at this point, without further argument, it could be that primary matter is itself the ultimate necessary being. A note on the Fourth Way:  Even though St. Thomas invokes Aristotle in this argument, it has the ring of neo-Platonism.  Also, notice that the argument as presented does not attempt to show that the maximal being is also maximally good and maximally true.  It simply assumes this identity in what "we call God."  Once again, this is an indication that the arguments are meant to tie our natural tendency to believe in a God with specific descriptions that will then be appealed to in the articulation of the difference between God and other beings. A note on the Fifth Way:  St. Thomas argues that that the fact of teleology in nature entails an intelligent orderer.  In this he seems to agree with all those atheists who are eager to banish every vestige of real-world teleology from the natural sciences.  (I say 'real-world' because some might claim that we must use teleological explanations because of our epistemic limitations, but that we should not conclude that there is any real teleology out there beyond our explanations.)  Is this a good argument?  I don't know.  I would have thought that an Aristotelian could just claim that the principles that give rise to teleological explanations are just basic intrinsic facts about substances and that they don't require further explanation.  But what do I know?  St. Thomas believes that such principles ineluctably point back to an intelligent being. Question 3:  God's Simplicity General comments:  Here we see St. Thomas at his best.  We do not have a direct positive grasp of God's essence which we could use as a strarting point for inquiry, as we do with ordinary physical substances.  Further, we cannot in principle attain such a grasp in this life just on the basis of our familiarity with God's effects, in the way that we reason to the existence of theoretical physical entities and components in order to explain various effects that occur in the natural world.  This is the force of St. Thomas's saying that we do not and cannot (in this life) know God as He is in Himself.  You might think he's just kidding, because you have a 350-page book in front of you with everything St. Thomas has to say about God in Himself.  But as we go on, I think it will become clear that he is not kidding and that our language about God is so alien from the natural substances from which that language takes its origin that we hardly know what we are talking about when we talk about God.  This is good, St. Thomas thinks, since it prevents us from being too comfortable, as it were, about our intellectual and affective grasp of God.  It also highlights God's goodness to us in making known to us things that we could not have known without His self-revelation and yet that are crucial for our ability to flourish in accord with our nature.  (From St. Thomas's perspective, God is not at all pleased with the rampant relativism and agnosticism concerning His nature and actions that tends to be popular in contemporary liberal democracies -- you know what I mean:  "No one is in a better position than anyone else to know what God is like or expects from us."  From St. Thomas's perspective, God has been beating down the door trying to get through to us at least since the time of Abraham.  But, then, the God of the Old and New Testaments tends to keep us from doing what we want to do in our post-lapsarian condition.  So it is more convenient for us to profess utter ignorance about what God might expect from us.) Because of our limitations, the best we can hope for at the beginning is to show that God utterly transcends the things with which we are familiar and which serve as the natural objects of our knowlege, viz., material substances.  St. Thomas does this negatively, by trying to show that God lacks all the limitations found in His effects.  Given the classical metaphysical framework he is operating within, he has a very precise and effective way of doing this.  Scholastic metaphysics posits a series of types of composition that are either found directly in created things or which are derived from them.  These include (a) composition of integral material parts, (b) composition of form and matter, (c) composition of suppositum (or subject) and nature (or essence or quiddity), (d) composition of esse and essence (or nature), (e) composition of genus and difference, (f) composition of substance and accident.  The conclusion is that God is unlimited in every way and hence perfect.  This is the upshot of the so-called via negativa or via remotionis.  Anything else we say about God will be under the cloud of God's utter transcendence as shown by this via remotionis.  Hence, at the conclusion of the via remotionis we have questions about our knowledge of God and about our names for God.  Only then do we go on to say something about God's intellectual and volitional operations, where this is based both on reason and revelation.  So question 3 plays an absolutely crucial role here.  (In this connection, you might want to take a look at my short piece on the so-called 'open theory of God'.) 3,1:  The first thing to notice here is that St. Thomas does not think it is self-evident that God is not a body and thus composed of material parts.  This requires an argument.  (After all, lots of people have identified God with various material entities, both natural and man-made.)  Furthermore, all the objections in this question invoke Scriptural attributions of bodily parts, shape, posture, etc., to God.  St. Thomas needs to show that these attributions are metaphorical.  There are several things at work here.  One is the philosophical articulation of God's transcendence that helps us to make the distinction between metaphorical and literal attributions.  But it is important to remember that St. Thomas is not working in a vacuum here.  The Scriptures themselves make attributions of God that are seemingly in tension with one another, and long before St. Thomas came on the scence there were commentary traditions in both Judaism and Christian that had already dealt with this problem, and the Church had already spoken definitively about many of the divine attributes.  So St. Thomas does not intend to throw all that out and come up with his own new interpretation of Scripture.  What he intends to do is to provide a philosophically systematic and coherent account of God's transcendence that yields results consonant with the teaching of the Church and with the preponderance of the Patristic interpretations of passages on which Church teaching allows some degree of leeway on interpretation. Note that the three arguments all tease out the implications of names of God established in question 2, viz., 'Unmoved Mover' (no passive ability to be acted upon), 'First Being' (no admixture of passive potentiality), 'Most Noble Being'.  The replies to the objections all explicate the literal meaning that underlies the metphorical attributions of materiality to God. One interesting sidelight here is ad 2, where St. Thomas explains that it is because of man's reason and intellect -- and not because of his body -- that we are said to be made in God's image.  Without denying the centrality of reason and intellect, Pope John Paul II, in his theology of the body, has argued that the complementary physical differences between men and women are also wrought in God's image in the sense in which this notion is invoked in Genesis.  Intriguing, eh? 3,2:  We next move on to composition of form and matter, had by all material substances according to an Aristotelian conception of them.  Here two of the objections come from Scripture, one with an attribution of a soul to God and the other with the attributions of passions, e.g., anger, which on an Aristotelian view essentially involve a bodily change.  The last objection is a metaphysical one, viz., that God is an individual and that the principle of individuation is matter.  St. Thomas's first argument is once again are traceable back to the descriptions of God as 'Pure Actuality'.  Given that God is pure actuality, He has no passive potency; but anything composed of form and matter can be acted upon.  The third argument is that form is the principle of acting in an agent and that since God is a first agent (an agent who is not acted upon), He must be pure form without matter. The argument I want to focus on, however, is the second one, since it introduces a Platonic distinction that will feature prominently in St. Thomas's account of God.  This is the distinction between being such-and-such through one's essence and being such-and-such by participation.  In this instance, the distinction is deployed to distinguish God, who is good through His essence, from material substances, which are good by participation insofar as their matter participates in form.  The conclusion is that God must be form. Let's look at the distinction a bit more closely.  To be such-and-such through one's essence implies not only that one is such-and-such by nature but also that one has, so to speak, the fullness of the relevant character.  This becomes clear when St. Thomas applies the distinction to being itself.  There is a sense in which everything is essentially a being -- for it cannot exist without being a being.  However, only God is Subsistent Esse through His essence, since only God is an ultimately necessary being and only God possesses the fullness of being. A last word about ad 3.  Matter is a principle of individuation, according to St. Thomas, only in the case of forms that "can be received in matter."  However, God and other spiritual substances are such that they are subsistent forms incapable of being received in matter.  Therefore, they are individuals in themselves. 3,3:  In this article we find another distinction that can be used to separate God (and other spiritual substances) off from substances composed of form and matter, viz., the distinction between the nature of a thing and the subject or suppositum which has that nature.  For instance, we can say 'Socrates has humanity' or 'Socrates has a human nature' as a philosophically sophisticated version of 'Socrates is a man'.  And we can say that Socrates's humanity exists 'in' him.  So here is another form of composition.  (However, from this point on, the objections are taken no longer from Scripture but from various philosophical standpoints.  In each case, St. Thomas tries to show either that the philosophical objection is wrongheaded to begin with or that it needs to be modified in order to extend the philosophical theories in question to the case of God.) On the surface, it seems that we can attribute this form of composition to God.  For just as we say 'Humanity exists in Socrates', so too we can say 'Divinity exists in God'.  Moreover, given that God is the cause of other things and that causes effect what is similar to themselves, it seems that God, like we ourselves, is such that in Him there is a composition of suppositum and nature (or essence). St. Thomas replies by explaining another difference between material substances and spiritual substances, which are subsistent forms.  In the former, the nature includes just that which is common to all the members of the species and is captured by the real definition of the species.  But in addition, each individual of the species has its own set of material accidental determinations that fall outside the definition of the species.  These material accidental determinations are lacking in the case of spiritual substances, and so in such substances there is no composition of suppositum and nature.  The subsistent substance just is its own nature.  (Lurking in the background is St. Thomas's disputed claim that each angel constitutes his own species.)  A fortiori, this holds in the case of God as well.  So God is not distinct from His divinity or from the other essential determinations, e.g., life, that count as part of the nature in the case of material things.  (A different story has to be told about those determinations that are accidents in our case, e.g., wisdom and power.) We should pay special attention to ad 1.  Here St. Thomas enunciates a constant theme of his teaching on God:  "We ourselves are unable to talk about simple entities except in the way we talk about the composite entities from which we take our cognition.  And so, when speaking of God, we use concrete names to signify His subsistence (since by our lights it is only composites that subsist), and we use abstract names to signify His simplicity.  So the fact that divinity, life, and other things of this sort are said to be ‘in’ God should be traced back to a duality (diversitas) that occurs in our intellect’s grasp of the thing and not to any duality within the thing itself."  This defectiveness of language is something we cannot correct except by pairing ordinary ways of speaking ('God is living') with ways of speaking that from our ordinary perspective are deviant ('God is His life'). 3,4:  We next come to a form of composition which is characteristic of all created substances, including created spiritual substances, and that distinguishes every creature from God.  This is composition of esse and essence (or nature).  This type of composition is lacked only by a being that does not depend on another for its esse or existence.  Both of the objections take esse in a minimalist sense as what is common to everything and expressed by the English term 'exists', i.e., that in virtue of which a thing is something rather than nothing.  (This is the second and propositional sense of esse pointed out in ad 1.)  This is pretty paltry for the divine essence, which presumably includes all perfections, and so the conclusion in both cases is that God's essence must be something more than His esse. But as St. Thomas uses it here, esse in any given case is such-esse.  For instance, horse-esse differs from pig-esse.  This is the upshot of the second argument.  A thing's esse is just the actuality of its essential perfections.  In God this esse is not received, since there is no potentiality to be actualized.  Instead, there is just pure actuality. This goes along with the first argument:  Anything that has composition of esse and essence must be such that its esse is caused by another; but this is incompatible with God's status as the First Efficient Cause. The third argument is of the Platonistic type introduced above.  God is not a being by participation that has some proper subset of the set of all perfections.   (Note that even angels are beings by participation and receive their esse from another.)   Rather, He is a being through His essence, since He is the first being.  This entails, as becomes clear with ad 2, then His esse is unlimited (i.e., unparticipated) and hence not knowable by us in this life. As we go on, it should be getting clearer and clearer that God is utterly transcendent.  We certainly can't imagine what it is to God, and we can't really conceive it, either.  All we can say is:  well, He's not like trees, bugs, human beings, angels, etc.  We need to say strange things even in order to express what little we know of Him. 3,5:  The next sort of composition is the logical composition of genus and difference.  Even though this is, according to St. Thomas (if not Duns Scotus) a logical rather than physical composition, it nonetheless reflects the physical components (form/matter) of the substance in question.  And in every case in which the genus/difference distinction applies the potentiality/actuality distinction applies as well.  From this it follows straightforwardly that there is no such composition in God. In denying that God is in a genus, either as a species or by reduction, St. Thomas is in effect denying that there any limitations to God's perfection.  For a genus is limited in a way that is incompatible with God's role as the principle of all esse. Note that in ad 1 St. Thomas denies that God is a substance--or, at least, that He can be thought of as contained in the category (i.e., most general genus) of substance.  3,6:  The next, and last, sort of composition is the composition of substance and accident.  In each case the accident actualizes some passive potentiality on the part of the substance.  Hence, it follows straightforwardly that God has no accidents.  Any perfections that God has He has by essence and not by virtue of any reality that brings to perfection was is present only potentially in the divine substance.  Of course, our language is not adapted to such a being, since we think of accidents as realities in their own right (or, at least, we should so think of them in general).  And so we have to say weird things about God such that God is not only wise but Wisdom itself, in order to indicate that God's wisdom, unlike ours, is not an accident and, in this case at least, an accident that can come and go.  More on this below when we get to question 13. 3,7:  St. Thomas's first argument simply summarizes the first six articles.  In effect, it says that (a) a simple being has no composition, that (b) these are the six types of composition that things can have, that (c) God has none of them, and that therefore (d) God is absolutely simple.  As an absolutely simple being, He is wholly other than every other being.  When we add in a. 8 that, unlike points, lines, surfaces and primary matter, God is a simple being who does not enter into the composition of anything else, we see that God is utterly unlike any object of our actual or possible (in this life) experience.  An aura of mystery surrounds Him.  "Who is like unto Him?" The remaining arguments all invoke the descriptions of God established in question 2.  A first being cannot be posterior to its components; a first efficient cause cannot itself have a cause; a being that is pure actuality cannot have any potentiality. 3,8:  If God is in some sense the esse of all things, then it might seem that He must enter into composition with other things.  Furthermore, there seems to be no easy way to distinguish God from primary matter, which enters into the composition of all material substances.  For both of them are simple in themselves. Notice that once again St. Thomas finds it necessary to argue for a conclusion that those of us brought up in the tradition of Judaeo-Christian revelation might find obvious.  This is because he really is starting from ordinary people's vague conceptions of God.  In fact, in this article he tries to refute two separate types of pantheism, one of which identifies God with the World-Soul and the other of which "stupidly" identifies Him with matter. He first points out that a (transeunt) efficient cause effects something distinct from itself.  So given that God is the first efficient cause of the world, it follows that He is is distinct from the world.  What's more, any matter or form that enters into composition with another cannot itself be an agent, even it might be  a principle of acting; rather, it is the composite that it is "primarily and per se" an agent.  But God is primarily and per se an agent. Notice how in ad 2 St. Thomas accommodates the citation to St. Augustine in obj. 2.  What he does -- and this is his standard procedure -- is to find a sense in which what Augustine says is true but does not damage the position St. Thomas wishes to defend.  In this case, for instance, he points out that the Word of God, i.e., the Son of God eternally begotten by the Father, is a form in the sense of being an exemplar of all created things.  This will become clearer below, given St. Thomas's claim that all created things in some way imitate God's being and nature.  But the main point I am making here is his treatment of Augustine.  Some claim that the Summa Theologiae is replete with positions that would be rejected by Augustine and that, in general, St. Thomas replaces the Platonizing tendencies of Augustine with a type of Aristotelianism.  There may be some truth to this claim, but it is often made by people who fail to appreciate just how much Platonism there is in St. Thomas's system.  The idea that there is a fundamental opposition between St. Thomas and St. Augustine is, I believe, highly exaggerated, though it cannot be denied that while Augustine develops a more 'interior' approach to God in many of his writings, St. Thomas's way is to proceed by way of our experience of the natural world.  In general, St. Thomas is more impressed by the world of nature and the natural sciences Question 4:  God's Perfection General Comments:  From the discussion of simplicity, St. Thomas goes on to a discussion of perfection and goodness.  God's absolute simplicity is a necessary and sufficient condition for God's perfection, since the various types of composition represent all the sources of finitude and imperfection.  What's more, St. Thomas takes this occasion to make a first stab at the question of how God's perfections are related to the perfections of creatures. 4,1:  Those ancients who limited themselves to thinking just of the first material principle, viz., matter, did not think it to be perfect.  But St. Thomas points out that it has already been established that God is a first efficient principle and not a first material principle.  And such a principle must be perfect, since perfection varies according to degree of actuality, and God is maximally actual. In ad 3 St. Thomas makes this clearer by pointing out that esse is the principle of actuality.  We must not think of a created substance as somehow constituted prior to receiving esse.  Rather, everything that it is (including all its parts and components) is conferred with God's conferral of esse.  This must be true if everything is created by God ex nihilo, i.e., depends immediately on God for its existence and the existence of all its parts and components.  In the case of creation, we can think of a created thing as having a part of -- or participating in -- esse-as-such, the plenitude of all being and perfection.  God, by contrast, just is unpartitioned esse and hence has all perfection. 4,2:  St. Thomas wants to claim that all the perfections of things exist in God.  But the objections to this claim seem insurmountable.  First of all, some of the perfections of creatures (e.g., differences which constitute the species within a given species) are opposed to one another.  What's more, some of the perfections of things (e.g., their quantitative accidents) are incompatible with God's simplicity and His immateriality.  So how to respond? St. Thomas first argues from the general thesis that effects must in some way or other be similar to their causes.  Why hold this?  Well, it is obvious in the case of univocal causes, which share the same nature with their effects.  But what of equivocal causes, i.e., causes that are in some sense superior to their effects?  Here, St. Thomas says, the effects preexist virtually in their causes in a more eminent way.  Is this any more than simply forcing the principle to be true?  Take, for instance, the case of intelligent agents.  I call your paper 'intelligent' because you used your intelligence well in writing it.  So your paper is similar to you in some relevant respect, even though you are an equivocal or non-univocal cause of it.  In the same way, St. Thomas insists, even non-intelligent equivocal agents must, by virtue of producing an effect, have had that effect in their power as that which they were ordered to.  (Qualifications are necessary here, since agents sometimes fail to bring about all the perfection they are ordered to.)  And, as we have already seen, St. Thomas traces the operation of non-intelligent causes to the operation of God as the intelligent orderer of natural operations. Now every created thing stands to God as your paper stands to you.   So by virtue of being capable of producing every possible created perfection, God possesses such perfections "in a more eminent mode" than He would if He were just the subject of, and not the efficient cause, of them. However, there is another thing at stake here, and it has to do with a danger posed by the strong theory of divine transcendence that St. Thomas articulates.  The danger is that God will be so remote to us that all divine names become equally appropriate or inappropriate.  This deteriorates into a type of agnosticism that threatens any order in the divine names.  For instance, if all we meant by 'God is good' is that God is a cause of good, then we would be completely in the dark about what God is like in Himself -- even to the point of wondering whether our use of the term 'good' in ordinary circumstances has anything at all to do with God's goodness.  In question 6 St. Thomas will argue that God is good in Himself through His essence and hence the standard of all good things.  So here, when he argues that God has every perfection, he is in part aiming to show that there is a similarity between created perfections, including created goodness in general, and God's perfection.  This will become clearer as we go on, and especially in question 13 on the divine names.