Thomas P. Bukowski, “Beyond Aristotle… and Beyond Newton: Thomas Aquinas on an Infinite Creation.” The Thomist, Volume 68, Number 2, April 2004: 307-308.

In [his Quodlibet 3, and some parallel passages], Thomas does not ask whether God could create an actual infinity, but whether, if it were created, God could know it. And he answers yes. For example, in De Veritate (q. 2, a. 9) he says, “Essentia . . . Dei est infinita omnibus modis; et secundum hoc omnia infinita sunt Deo finita, et sunt comprehensibilia ab ipso” (corp. ad fin.). The parallel passages in Quodlibet 3 (a late work) and in other works carry substantially the same message: God is infinite in every way; therefore, those beings that are infinite in lesser or fewer ways are, or would be, as if finite to him. They would be not only knowable to him but completely understandable (“comprehensibilia”).

Although such texts concern knowing rather than creating, they directly imply a doctrine that points up the significance of Thomas’s outlook on infinite creation. He believes that a created infinity would be truly comprehensible to God but not to creatures. One is reminded here of what is sometimes said of the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth: he holds that God must be a God-for-us. Yet for Barth as for Thomas God is completely self-sufficient; he has no need of creation for his perfection or for his perfect happiness. Now, in this matter of God’s comprehending any created infinity, we see the extent to which, for Thomas too, God is a God-for-us. InThomas’s view it is out of the question that God would make a creature that, per se, though understandable by him could be understood by no intellectual creatures, either angelic or human. In this sense the intelligibility of the cosmos is for them, not for himself.

A favorite medieval saying tells that the Good gives of itself: “bonum sui diffusivum est”; thus the perfect Good, which is God, overflows and pours itself into creation. Accordingly, the wisdom of the creator will respect and enrich the intellect of angel and man.

The idea of “bonum diffusivum sui” is characteristic of Christian Neoplatonic thinking. But in Thomas we see, as may well have been expected, the return toAristotle.

Despite going beyond Aristotle in physics and natural philosophy, Thomas remains in accord, after all, with the Aristotelian spirit. From that great Greek humanist he has acquired a profound conviction of the intelligibility, the “formfulness,” of our created world and a high regard for the intellect of both angels (“separate substances”) and men. His final position agrees fully, at the same time, with the Christian view of the dignity of the intellectual creature. For, as we may infer from the texts that we have seen, in Thomas’s system the trouble with actual infinity--the evil in it--is not that God would not know it; it is that no intellectual creature would. The entire created universe, made for God as its highest and ultimate end, is made for intellectual creatures as its very high intermediate end.

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Return to Lesson 23: Does the Big Bang Prove Creation?