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Twelve  Sed Contra Some of my fellow Thomists have taken exception to Thomas’s reading of Aristotle’s theology in a number of ways.1 Sometimes we are told that what Thomas says in his commentaries does not represent his own thought, but merely that of Aristotle. At other times we are told that what Thomas says in such commentaries represents his own thought, and not that of Aristotle. The second view is the more interesting, if only because it is susceptible of testing. The test consists in asking whether what Thomas makes of Aristotle’s text is actually the meaning of that text. 1. The Eternity of the World It will escape no one’s attention that, in reviewing the way in which Aristotle established the existence of a first eternal substance by appeal to the eternity of time and motion, Thomas criticized Aristotle’s argument, characterizing its premises as being at best probable. For all that, he thinks the conclusion follows even more obviously from the assumption that the world is not eternal, something Thomas of course as a Christian believes to be the case. Nonetheless, he does not agree with those who would dismiss Aristotle by saying that his opinion that the world is eternal involves incoherence and self-contradiction. Thomas’s own position is that, philosophice loquendo, neither the eternity nor the noneternity of the world can be definitively established . The noneternity of the world is a truth of faith, not of reason. 283 1. Michael Frede, “Introduction,” 5ff., questions Ross’s description of Book XII as “Aristotle ’s Theology,” and goes on in such a way that the puzzle introduced by Jaeger as to whether or not metaphysics is a special or general science is rendered unintelligible. If “theology” is taken to have the divine as its subject matter, it is simply not an Aristotelian possibility (cf. Book VII, 17). Frede makes clear that immaterial substance is, from a methodological point of view, a function of sensible substance. It is only as cause of the latter that the former can enter in. That, of course, is precisely St. Thomas’s understanding of philosophical theology, “function” being understood quoad nos, of course. 284 Thomism and PhilosophicalTheology One might imagine that this discussion would disturb the view that Thomas is less than personally engaged in the reasoning of the text he explicates . Holders of the second view have taken this criticism of Aristotle’s proof to conceal a radical misunderstanding of Aristotle. Thomas, it is well known, does not think that one who holds that the world is eternal is thereby committed to denying that it is created. But if there is any received opinion among contemporary Thomists (with of course laudable exceptions) in the matter, it is that the world of Aristotle is not, and cannot be, a created world. Let us first look at Thomas on the way in which an eternal world can be a created world. In his polemical opusculum De aeternitate mundi contra murmurantes, Thomas first sets aside the position that there could be an eternal uncreated world, a position that collides with the teaching of “philosophers who maintain and prove that whatever in any way exists must be caused by him who fully and most truly has existence.”2 If an eternal world were held to be impossible , then, this would have to be because God could not create it. This in turn seems to call into question God’s omnipotence. Still, if one says that God could create an eternal world, the question arises as to how such a world could be said to come to be. Faith apart, there are two sources of the rejection of an eternal world: the denial can stem from the nature of passive potency, or from the belief that an eternal world makes no sense. As for the first, of an angel we can say that before it came to be, no passive potency preceded his existence. That is, there was nothing that could be but was not actually the angel; this follows from the fact that an angel is an immaterial being. Nonetheless, God created angels , so lack of a prior passive potency seems not to tell against the possibility that God made something that always was. The second reason for rejecting the possibility of an eternal world is that it is conceptually incoherent. Thomas notes that some have held that God could have created an eternal world despite this incoherence, but that...

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