Aquinas Regarding Almighty...Again

Aquinas Regarding Almighty was posted in the early days of this blog, but I thought I’d bring it up again because…

1. It’s Aquinas’s feast day.

2. We have more followers now.

3. It’s just cool stuff! Joe and I never get tired of this sort of thing. What sort of thing? Thinking things and connecting things…because thinking means connecting things.

 

The post relates to the premise that God creates out of nothing. Now, some ridiculous discussions can be had about what really is “nothing”. Some say there is no such thing as “nothing”, which is true if there is always God (being itself), but to avoid sidetracks to nowhere and to bring some additional clarity, it might be better to start by saying that God requires no other condition, or set of conditions to exist in order to create. He is the one reality that requires no other reality.

 

 

Aquinas Regarding Almighty

St Thomas Aquinas falls into that category of people I like to call “scary-smart”. Reading his work can result in a peculiar experience, at least for me. I may read something translated to English well using perfect grammar, and understand the meaning of each individual word, yet somehow not understand what was said. Does Aquinas write nonsense or am I not the sharpest knife in the theological drawer? The latter is more reasonable.  Here is a case in point from the Compendium to Summa Theologica chp 70:

 

“The more remote a potency is from act, the greater must be the power that reduces it to act.”

 

With help from other Catholic thinkers that explain Aquinas and my blog buddy Joe, I can make sense of such a sentence. Rephrasing in more common language, I think it may read something like this:

 

The less one has to make something potentially happen, the more power one needs to make it actually happen. But what does this mean when contemplating ultimate things?

 

Analogies are most helpful………

Suppose you have a new car you wish to start. All that is needed is the key and the ability to turn the ignition; not very difficult. Now take away the gasoline. You now need the ability to get some gasoline, put in it the car and then start it. More resources are needed. In a sense you might say you need more “power”. Now take away the battery as well. You now need to get a battery, install it, get gasoline in the car, and then start it. You’ll need even more “power”.

 

The more that is taken away from the car, the more power needed to make it actually work. Taking away things to infinity becomes nothingness. Adding power to infinity becomes “all powerful”. If left with nothing to work with (no-thing), no matter, no energy, no force, no time, no space (no outside condition), the only way you could make a car first exist and then start it is if you had infinite power. To create from nothing then, requires infinite power.

St. Thomas Aquinas

1225 - 1274

All of this to truly understand one word in our Creed. The word “Almighty” is not used simply because it sounds lofty and majestic. It describes, from logical necessity, the kind of power needed to bridge an infinite gap between potency and act.

Thank you St. Thomas Aquinas; thou art scary-smart!
 

Tribute to B16 seven years on: Professor Ratzinger on “The Supreme Being”

It’s been seven years since Cardinal Ratzinger was elected Pope; so much for a transition papacy. Seven is often a number that represents completeness or perfection in scripture. I don’t think his pontificate is completed and he is not perfect in terms of impeccability, which is often confused with infallibility, but that is another post for another time.

I do, however, want to share insights from reading his book from the 1960’s called Introduction to Christianity. The title sounds deceivingly simple, but it’s a heavy read (for me anyway). I heard somewhere that this was a favorite book of JP2, and after reading it, I had to put our Pope into a category of people I like to call “scary-smart”.

What do you mean you disagree with me?
Do you know who you're dealing with?

It reminded me of reading Aquinas or Augustine. There were occasions when I may have known the meaning of each individual word in a paragraph and the grammar was perfect, yet somehow, I did not understand. Anyway, I understood some things and I’ll have a series of post to share in the weeks to come. This post is about “The Supreme Being”.

Paraphrasing from Part One, Chapter III…
The God of faith is personal, defined by the category of relationship. The God of the philosophers is “The Supreme Being” and tends to be impersonal.

In this view it seems an absurd idea that this Supreme Being should concern himself with man and his pitiful little world, his cares, his sins, and his non-sins. Oddly, this projects negative human characteristics of pettiness, arrogance and aloofness onto the Supreme Being. We thereby imagine him as a consciousness that will NOT embrace the whole.

By calling God “Father” and “Almighty”, The Creed has joined together the family concept and the cosmic power in one God; the God of faith and the God of the philosophers. This expresses accurately the whole point of the Christian image of God. The tension between:

Ø  Absolute power and absolute love

Ø  Absolute distance and absolute proximity

Ø  Absolute being and direct affinity

Ø  Maximum and minimum

Ø  The greatest and the least

Ø  The first and the last

Ø  BOTH/AND, not either/or

Not to be encompassed by the greatest, but to let oneself be encompass by the smallest – that is divine.

Stay tuned for more as I’m able to process it. As I mentioned, the good professor is “scary-smart”. If you don’t hear from me, you may assume my brain has exploded.

BRAIN-FREEZE
Always study Professor Ratzinger S-L-O-W-L-Y!

Aquinas Regarding Almighty

St. Thomas Aquinas falls into that category of people I like to call “scary-smart”. Reading his work can result in a peculiar experience. I may read something translated to English well, using perfect grammar, and understand the meaning of each individual word, yet somehow, not understand what was said. Does Aquinas write nonsense or am I not the sharpest knife in the theological drawer? The later is much more reasonable.  Here is a case in point from the compendium to Summa Theologica:

“The more remote a potency is from act, the greater must be the power that reduces it to act.”

With help from other Catholic theologians that explain Aquinas and my blog buddy Joe, I can make sense of such a sentence. Rephrasing in more common language, it may read something like this: The less one has to make something potentially happen, the more power needed to make it actually happen. But what does this mean when contemplating ultimate things?

Analogies are most helpful………

Suppose you have a new car you wish to start. All that is needed is the key and the ability to turn the ignition; not very difficult. Now take away the gasoline. You now need the ability to get some gasoline, put in the car and then start it. More resources are needed. In a sense you might say that you need more “power”. Now take away the battery as well. You’ll need even more “power”.

The more that is taken away from the car, the more power needed to make it actually work. Taking away things to infinity becomes nothingness. Adding power to infinity becomes all powerful. If left with not a single molecule to work with (nothing), the only way you could make a car first exist and then start it, is if you had infinite power. To create from nothing, then, requires infinite power.

All of this to get one word in our Creed. The word “Almighty” is not used simply because it sounds lofty and majestic. It describes, from logical necessity, the kind of power needed to bridge an infinite gap between potency and act.

St. Thomas Aquinas

1225 - 1274

"scary-smart"