In What Sense is god Infinite?: A Thomistic Perspective

IN WHAT SENSE IS GOD INFINITE? A THOMISTIC PERSPECTIVE PROCESS THEOLOGY SHARES with Thomism the endeavor to use the full resources of reason in seeking to clarify the being of God, a project that brings both into the domain of metaphysics. But there is a quite distinct metaphysics pursued in one and in the other, with the consequence that the one God who is sought has differing identities in each. The twentieth century work of Whitehead and the thirteenth century work of Aquinas represent massive refinements of, respectively, Plato's many gods subordinate to the Forms and Aristotle's one god as" Thought ThinkingThought," but the two continue to represent distinct lines of historical development . Whiteheadians, having secured God's involvement with the world on the basis of his dipolar nature, continue to address the problem of how such a God can be infinite in other than a relative sense. Contemporary Thomists, preferring to safeguard the "infinite qualitative difference," affirm God's infinity in absolute terms which preclude all finitude, but are still striving to make intelligible how there can be any genuine concern on God's part for a finite order toward which he bears no ontic receptivity. Lewis S. Ford addresses the problem seriously in reading Whitehead's descriptive definition of God as" the nontemporal entity " 1 to mean that God is actually infinite in the sense that his " nontemporal completeness must include an actual infinity of possibilities." God is infinite, and actually so, in his envisagement of the entire range of pure possibilities that excludes only "the self-contradictory notion of infinite determinateness ." The envisagement of real possibilities, by con1 Cf. Process and Reality (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1929) pp. 48, 63f., and 73. 14 GOD INFINITE? A THOMISTIC VIEW 15 trast, would allow to God only a potential infinity. Yet what is here denied appears to be precisely what the thought of St. Thomas ascribes to God as the Pure Act of " To Be." The categories of explanation, at any rate, are mutually exclusive; seemingly we are left with a genuine aporia. Is Ford's explanation a radical alternative to that of Aquinas? Or is it an attempt to address something left unsaid in the thought of the latter? Are there any prospects here for something like Heidegger 's Kehre, i.e., a development within thought itself that represents a change in direction, yet one latent in the movement of earlier thought? The question remains-and it can best be served at this point by a continued exploration of the virtualities inherent in each thought system. What follows, then, is less a rebuttal or repudiation of Ford's illuminating endeavor than an engagement in the dialectic which the question itself urges upon intelligence. 1. The Denial of " Concrete " Infinity The dipolar God of process theism is at once finite and infinite, the supreme instance of both categories. He is finite insofar as his actuality is always such in some determinate way-in fidelity to Whitehead's principle: "all actuation is finite, as the exclusion of alternative possibility." 2 But is it logically impossible to ascribe to God an infinity that is at once actual and determinate? This is surely so, as long as one remains in the realm of essential determination (whether the essence be viewed specifically or individually does not matter at this point). To be an oak tree is precisely not to be an elm tree; to be this oak tree is exactly not to be that other oak tree. But this is precisely the kind of determinateness that Aquinas refuses to God in calling him the Pure Actuality of Be-ing (the hyphenated form serving to draw attention to the participial character of the term) . God is not an essence having being (existence) and so trimming the latter to the modal determination and limitation of itself, thereby excluding •Adventures of Ideas (N. Y.: Macmillan, 1933) p. 333. 16 WILLIAM J. BILL all other essential determinations. Rather, what answers to essence in his case is in fact the sheer act of "to be" (esse) .8 The Godhead then, in Thomas's thought, is not a being (ens), nor the sum total of what all the...