Comparing Naturalism to the Ideas Proposed in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ “Book
Three: Providence of Summa Contra Gentiles”
Andrea Restrepo, 2024
“Book Three: Providence of Summa Contra Gentiles” by Saint Thomas Aquinas
provides an explanation of evil while maintaining that everything that God created is
good. As the name suggests, this is Aquinas’ third book in this series in which the first
one he established was the “perfection of the divine nature” (p. 33) , then “perfection of
His power… in Book Two”. By perfection of divine nature, I take this to mean the
existence of a perfect deity which is followed by the absolute authority that is
understood in the second book. In short, the prerequisite knowledge needed to
understand Aquinas’ perspective is that there is an omnipotent God, a single source of
all existing things. I agree with Aquinas in many ways except in the idea that the
beginning of all beings was God, and the ultimate end of all things being God as well. In
this essay, I will look through his writing and give my best explanation of how I believe
that his logic could still apply to a world without an omnipotent God better than, or as
good as the idea of a God.
Exploring Aquinas’ Beings of Good and Corruptibly
Firstly, Aquinas specifies different entities with diverse natures. Humans are
established in the first type of agent with the ability to rule over themselves and choose
their own end that fits. The second type do not have any will, these include any
inanimate objects but can be further divided into two more groups; Corruptible beings,
and incorruptible beings. Now, this is where my first disagreement with Aquinas lies. An
incorruptible being can suffer no defect in their natural being and will never stray from a
prearranged path, and so due to the conditions laid out in further chapters, can never do
any evil. The example provided is celestial bodies such as stars or planets on page 32.
However I believe there is nothing in the universe that is incapable to cause evil
according to the definitions outlined in the text. Even a star will eventually explode and
destroy planets in its wake. If there were a God that was all powerful, we would be able
to see at least some entities that were flawless in every way, however even within the
religious myths, angels turn against their creator, and all things have the potential for
evil. Since there are no incorruptible beings, then every inanimate object is corruptible,
and have a defect in their being.
Defining Good Agents
Now, one thing that I failed to address up to this point is my explanation for the
existence of beings that are good. In Book Three, Aquinas reasons that all of God’s
creations are good in some way because God, who is all good, created them so. When
the entity is corrupted, or has a defect in the being, it is not the way God designed it to
be and so is not fully good. How can I explain a good being using naturalism then? Here
I will argue that all beings exist as an imperfect version of their concept, which is the all
good being. Nothing that exists can be described as perfect or without defects, but we
can only make this comparison because we have an imaginary image of a perfect
version of them. This is where the concept serves the purpose for this essay. A perfect
star would shine forever and warm all the planets around it healthily, but every real star
has defects that will cause it to eventually explode; A human should be healthy and
good, but eventually we face unavoidable evils like dementia and immorality; A perfect
arrow would fly straight and true, but a real arrow will be somewhat unbalanced, or
asymmetrical and so on. This also implies that there is no true perfect good unless an
intelligent being is there to observe it.
The End
Now, Aquinas argues that every agent acts for an end, and that end is good. This
is true in the sense that all things that exist, need to also interact and change along with
the rest of the world, while also inclined to end by virtue of agreement with the outcome.
Intelligent beings are easy to explain as to why they seek goals like careers,
destinations, or reproduction, however inanimate objects cannot act the same way as
living things and so we need a deeper understanding. It’s easy to say that God ordains
the path (aka the end) of all entities (whether they have the ability to deny it or not), but
this explanation will not work if we deny God’s existence. For this to work, we will have
to clarify the ways we can define ‘an end’. ‘An end’ can exist even if there are no
personal reasons for it to be, similar to Layman’s definition of inanimate explanations.
This leads to the ultimate end I will describe later but will mention here. If we consider
the earth as an entity, we can explain its end as ‘continued existence’.
Exploring the Final End of All Things
I have nothing to add to Aquinas’ chapters 4 to 15 about how the evil in things is
unintended or the way evil is the privation of good because I agree with it and believe it
does not rely on the existence of an omnipotent God to be true. The last thing I wanted
to touch on was what might be referred to as ‘an ultimate end’ or the end of everything
specified in chapter 16. Aquinas defines the good end for everything as “that which all
things desire” and “the end of each thing is its perfection” (p.70). Once this final end is
reached, the agent will no longer be capable of actions and this implicitly implies that
they cease to exist. In the next chapter we only are provided with the first page of,
Aquinas suggests this ultimate end is God, but this will not work for our purposes now.
My first suggestion is that the ultimate end for all things be the desire for “continued
existence” that I mentioned earlier. This is because all things that exist tend to find ways
to survive or reproduce, otherwise if there were a thing that did not value existence, it
would not survive long enough to be studied or questioned by us. However there are
obvious flaws in this suggested solution. Firstly, based on Aquinas' statement that “it is
impossible to proceed to infinity” (p. 36) a non-end such as this will not work. This leads
us to another possible solution which is less obviously good. The final end that
terminates the will of all things by being in essence the perfection of itself is death, or
end of its existence. Now the first argument that can be used against this point is that all
things seek a good end that aligns with its nature or virtue, but death is rarely seen as
good. To counter this, we might want to bring up my previous point that stated that
nothing is ever perfect as everything except a thing’s concept has defects. So one may
argue that after a thing disappears or dies, the only remaining part of it is the perfect
concept left behind. Unfortunately I can neither say if this is a suitable replacement for
the position of a perfect good end such as God nor if it can hold up to criticism at the
moment but proving this is beyond what I can do with the time I have so I will leave it at
that.
In conclusion, Saint Thomas Aquinas finds a fascinating way to describe good
and evil and may work both with or without the presence of an omnipotent God, and
brings up interesting questions that are worth exploring.