{"id":263,"date":"2025-03-09T16:33:09","date_gmt":"2025-03-09T16:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2025\/03\/09\/thomas-aquinas-unity-is-our-strength\/"},"modified":"2025-03-09T16:33:09","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T16:33:09","slug":"thomas-aquinas-unity-is-our-strength","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2025\/03\/09\/thomas-aquinas-unity-is-our-strength\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summa Contra Gentiles<\/em>, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis<\/strong> added:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

. . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused  things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. And so it goes until one arrives at the lowest of things. And because in the highest summit of things, God, one finds the most perfect unity — and because everything, the more it is one, is the more powerful and the more worthy – – it follows that the farther one gets from the first principle,  the greater is the diversity and variation one one finds in things.<\/strong> The process of emanation from God, must, then be unified in the principle itself, but multiplied in the lower things which are its terms. <\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Key  ideas in and suggested by the above passage:<\/span><\/p>\n

1) Unity admits of degrees.  Some unities are 'tighter' than others. <\/span><\/p>\n

2) The supreme unity is the divine unity. It is the 'tightest' of all, so tight in fact, that God is devoid of all complexity or internal diversity and is therefore ontologically simple, as I explain in my Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy<\/em> article<\/a> on divine simplicity. God is pure unity, Unity itself in its highest instance.<\/span><\/p>\n

3) At the other extreme is pure diversity, a mere collection of items that cannot even be called a collection in that that there is nothing real that collects them, nothing real that they share and that makes them that<\/em> collection as opposed to some other actual or possible collection. Such a collection is so 'loose' that it does not deserve to be called a collection. We could aptly refer to it as a mere manifold, a mere many-ness.  Think of the membership or extension of  a mereological sum of utterly disparate items.  That would be a pure diversity or mere many-ness.<\/span><\/p>\n

4) Perfection comes in degrees, and so the divine unity is maximally perfect.  A mere many-ness is maximally imperfect.<\/span><\/p>\n

5) The notion of perfection in Aquinas and thinkers of his stripe blends the ontic with the axiological\/normative.  To be is to be good.  A being is good in the measure that it is<\/em>, and in the measure that it is<\/em>, it is good. That, I take it, is the meaning of ens et bonum convertuntur<\/em>. The terms 'a being' and 'a good thing' are convertible terms, which is to say, in Carnapian material mode: necessarily, for any x, x is or exists if and only if x is good,  valuable, pursuit-worthy. (That I reference Carnap in this context should have the old positivist rolling in his grave.)<\/span><\/p>\n

'In the measure that' conveys the idea that there are degrees of being, an idea anathema to most contemporary analytic philosophers.  Divine unity is maximally perfect unity, and thus the unsurpassably best unity and the unsurpassably most real unity. God is really real, ontos on<\/em>; at the other extreme, non-being, me on<\/em>, or an approach thereto  as in the limit concept (Grenzbegriff<\/em>), material prima<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

6) God's unity is the unity of the transcendent One which does not and cannot form with the Many a super-manifold in which God is just one member among the others. <\/span>The One and the Many do not, taken together, form a many of which the One is just one more item among the others.  Why not? Well, the One is other than<\/em> or different from the Many both in its nature and in its way of existing. God, for Aquinas, is One to the Many of creatures, but is neither a creature, nor  a member of a super-manifold of beings each of which is or exists in the same sense and the same way.  <\/span><\/p>\n

7) Aquinas says above that the more unified a thing, the more powerful it is. So God, the maximally unified being — so unified that this being (ens<\/em>) is (identically) Being or To Be (esse<\/em>) itself — is the maximally powerful being.  <\/span><\/p>\n

And so, in conclusion, I say to Canadian pretty boy Justin Trudeau, that diversity is precisely not "our strength," and that you and like-minded State-side fools are to be condemned for your willful self-enstupidation.<\/span><\/p>\n

My point stands whether or not one accepts Thomism. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Summa Contra Gentiles, Book IV, Chapter 1, C. J. O'Neill, tr., University of Notre Dame Press, 1975, p. 35, para. 2, emphasis added: . . . since causes are more noble than their effects, the very first caused  things are lower than the First Cause, which is God, and still stand out above their effects. … Continue reading “Thomas Aquinas: Unity is Our Strength!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,141,243,137,98],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aquinas-and-thomism","category-divine-simplicity","category-one-and-many","category-political-theology","category-unity-of-a-complex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}