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36 Article 5 The fifth point of inquiry is whether there can be anything that is not created by God. And it seems that this is possible.1 obj. 1. Since the cause is more powerful than its effect, that which is possible to our intellect, which takes its knowledge from things, would seem yet more possible to nature. Now our intellect can understand a thing apart from understanding that it is from God, because its efficient cause is not part of a thing’s essence, so that the thing can be understood without it. Much more therefore can there be a real thing2 that is not from God. obj. 2. All things made by God are called his creatures. Now creation terminates at being, for the first of created things is being, as is held in the Book of Causes.3 Since the quiddity of a thing is in addition to its being, it would seem that the quiddity of a thing is not from God. obj. 3. Every action terminates in an act, just as it proceeds from an act, because every agent acts insofar as it is in act,4 and every agent produces its like in nature.5 But prime matter is pure potentiality. Therefore the creative act cannot terminate in it, and so not all things are created by God. On the contrary, it is said in Romans 11, From him and through him and in him are all things.6 I answer that the ancients proceeded in accordance with the order of human knowledge in their examination of the nature of things. Thus as human knowledge reaches the intellect by beginning with the senses, the early philosophers were engrossed with the domain of the sensible, and from there gradually reached the intelligible. And because accidental forms are in themselves sensible, while substantial forms are not, the first philosophers said that all forms were accidents, and that matter alone was a substance. And because substance suffices to cause accidents that are caused through principles 1. For parallel discussions of this question, see ST I Q. 44, a. 1 and SCG II 15. 2. I am following Fr. Shapcote in translating “in rerum natura.” 3. Book of Causes, Prop. 4. 4. See article 1, note 14. 5. See article 1, note 10. 6. Romans 11:36. Article 5 37 of substance, the first philosophers held that there is no other cause besides matter, and that matter is the cause of all we observe in the sensible world. Consequently they were forced to state that matter has no cause, and to deny absolutely the existence of an efficient cause. The later philosophers, however, began to take some notice of substantial forms. Yet they did not attain to the knowledge of universals, but were wholly intent on the consideration of special forms.7 And so they did posit some active causes, not however such as confer being to things universally, but such as transmute matter to this or that form. Among these were intelligence, friendship, and strife, whose action they assumed in separation and adhesion.8 And so, according to them, not all beings proceeded from an efficient cause, but matter was presupposed in the action of an agent cause. Later philosophers, like Plato, Aristotle, and their followers, attained to the consideration of universal being itself, and so they alone posited some universal cause of things, from which all others came into being, as Augustine states in The City of God VIII.9 Cer7 . formas speciales. 8. In article 16, Thomas makes clear that he is thinking of Anaxagoras and Empedocles. In the respondeo he says, “Anaxagoras held that the divine intellect produced different things by separating them from commixture with matter ” (see Diels-Kranz 59B12–13). “And thus,” Thomas continues, “Empedocles held that different effects were distinguished and conjoined in various ways through friendship and strife according to the diversity of matter” (see DielsKranz 31B17, 21, 22, 26, 35). 9. Augustine, City of God, VIII 4. Augustine does not mention Aristotle by name in this text. On the question of whether Thomas means to attribute a doctrine of creation to Aristotle, see Mark Johnson, “Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?” New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129–55; James Weisheipl, O.P., “The Date and Context of Aquinas’ De aeternitate mundi,” in Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy presented to Joseph Owens , CSsR, ed. L. P. Gerson (Toronto: Pontifical Institue of Mediaeval Studies...

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