Thread by @Apotheiite

SHORT THREAD CRITIQUE OF ST. THOMAS AQUINAS | SUMMA THEOLOGIAE | AGAINST LOVE & WILL IN GOD
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Article 1. Whether love exists in God?

I. To the contrary, I object:
1. God should not possess faculties. Faculties imply other, alike to how sight implies there is light for it to see. Any faculty possessed by God must be perfected, and so the perfect faculty must actualise its perfect end.

Therefore, by necessity of God possessing said faculty, he must actualise the perfect end of that faculty. The faculty of love necessitates either the reception or impartation of love, so he is made to either make beings which will love him and/or beings which he can love.

Being forced to make beings to achieve his perfection is a deficiency, but without doing so he cannot perfect his faculty, leaving him imperfect.

2. Suppose the faculty’s perfection is achieved internally: what cause can be given to justify the faculty? If God is simple, he must also be uniform. If he is uniform, then he is one.

Being one, uniform, and simple, there can be no need for any internal faculties to complete him. He cannot be thought to have faculties that he effects upon himself as there is no portion of God which is distinguished from another.

Being one and the same, the faculty is rendered a needless addition as its self-convergence dilutes God’s simplicity of quietude oneness.

Article 1. Whether love exists in God?
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(St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae ctd.)

To the contrary, I object:
1.We read “the acts of the will tend towards good and evil”, and that “good is essentially and especially the object of the will and the appetite”, evil being “only the object secondarily and indirectly”.

The nature of will is denominated by Aquinas as being either of the ‘intellective appetite’ or the ‘sensitive appetite’. Will, then, is being’s act towards either the primary or secondary goods.

Thus by this we would define will as a ‘transitive mode’: the cause of act in being which motions it either towards primary or secondary goods in seek of its perfection within the Good.

2.Will cannot be in God as God subsists in self-sufficient union with himself and with all things. There are no participles in God although he envelops all things; each thing is subject to God’s omnipresence, meaning he holds all things within himself uniformly and at once.

Therefore, he does not will nor love towards any particular of the union because God’s union with the particulars is by way of God’s omnipresence immanently achieved in uniformity, simplicity, and singularity.

3. To hold will towards himself, which is to say that God wills to love himself, would be absurdity. As aforementioned, inward will towards himself would be a self-convergence that violates God’s simplicity, entailing there be within God a faculty which treats himself as a...

...distinct object to be willed upon. As his self-sufficient union entails simplicity, self-objectification would violate his simple oneness.

4.Further, as will is the transitive mode whereby act is caused in being to move towards their perfection via either the primary (intellective) or secondary (sensitive) goods, God must not participate in this will.

God, by his nature, is possessive of the whole and is the object of Good itself. Wholly Good and self-sufficient, any placing in God the transitive mode is to make deficiency.

The ocean has no will towards any one portion of its waters, nor the whole Earth towards any one part of its totality, but yet both subsist in simple unions of being: the ocean simply the self-same whole of all its waters, the Earth simply the self-same...

...whole of all its many particulars. In even these inferiors there is found no need for self-will, so we ought not give the efficiency of simple union to the material unions but then deny God this efficiency.

Surely, instead, we would see that God too in his perfect efficiency subsists needless and surpasses the requisite of will.