On God as Pure Act

Garrigou-Lagrange, Reginald – ‘Ontology’ & ‘Natural Theology’ in Realiity: a Synthesis of Thomistic Thought trans. Patrick Cummins (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1950) pp. 11-12

Garrigou-Lagrange (1877–1964) was a French, Romanist philosopher, theologian and Dominican friar. He has been noted as being a leading neo-Thomist of the 20th century. He taught at the Dominican Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome from 1909 to 1960.

Lagrange was the leading proponent of ‘strict observance Thomism’, which attracted wider attention when in 1946 he wrote against the Nouvelle Théologie theological movement, criticising elements of it as Modernist.

Muller, Richard – ‘Actus Purissimus‘ in Dictionary of Latin & Greek Theological Terms: Drawn Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology 1st ed. (Baker, 1985), p. 24

2000

Feser, Edward – ‘The Unmoved Mover’ in The Last Superstition: a Refutation of the New Atheism (St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), pp. 91-102

Feser (b. 1968) is a Romanist, professor of philosophy and an analytical Thomist. Here he masterfully explains in a simple and persuasive way the Cosmological argument for God’s existence, from the necessity of an unmoved mover if there is change at all.

He does not mention pure actuality till p. 96, but what leads up to it is a necessary prologue to understanding the necessity of pure actuality.

Duby, Steven J. – V.B., ‘Divine Simplicity & Divine Freedom’ in Divine Simplicity: a Dogmatic Account PhD diss. (Univ. of St. Andrews, 2014), pp. 247-66

Duby is a professor of theology at Phoenix Seminary. He has degrees from Moody, Denver Seminary and the Univ. of St. Andrews.

This section is where Duby discusses actus purus the most in his work.

Marino, Matthew – ‘Vindiciae Actus Purus: A Defense of the Thomistic Doctrine’ a seminary paper (n.d.)

Abstract: “The concept of actus purus ordinarily associated with Thomas Aquinas is among the most formidable proposals within the history of theology proper. It serves to neutralize the main criticisms against the classical doctrine of God. The thesis of this paper is that the doctrine of God in pure act is biblically faithful, logically necessary, and the best explanation for how the simple, timeless, immutable, and impassible God relates personally to his creatures.”

Quinones, Alan – ‘Toward the Worship of God as Actus Purus‘ The Masters Seminary Journal 31/2 (Fall 2020), pp. 213–30

This was published in a dispensationalist, MacArthurite journal.

“God is Actus Purus, which is to say that He is eternally all that He can be. Potentiality is a trait of creatures, not God. The concept of Actus Purus was first articulated by Aristotle in his argument for the unmoved mover, and through its history, the church has considered this notion a valid articulation of the absolute perfection and preeminence of God over all things.

This paper, then, explores the exegetical footing of Actus Purus. It also will seek to understand its implications for systematic theology. Careful exegesis will demonstrate that the doctrine of pure actuality is deducible from Scripture by good and necessary consequence. It is an instrument that helps to sound the unbounded perfection of God…”

Book

Gehring, Allen Stanley – Divine Simplicity as Actus Purus a Masters thesis Ref (Texas A & M University, 2005) 130 pp.

“This thesis presents a case for the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity by construing it along the lines that God exists as actus purus. My formulation of divine simplicity draws upon the medieval insight that God is what He is in virtue of what He does in one, eternal act of will with which He is identical.

In chapter I, I survey the contemporary literature on divine simplicity. In chapter II, I critique Alvin Plantinga’s Platonic theory of the divine attributes… In chapter III, I provide rejoinders to all of Plantinga’s defeaters against divine simplicity… In chapter IV, I develop a viable theory of divine simplicity, given an actus purus conception of God, and I formulate a number of arguments supporting it… As such, I seek to demonstrate that the traditional understanding of the divine essence is something that is worthy for theists to embrace and to explore…”

Order of Quotes

Trelcatius
Ames
Leigh
Baxter
Turretin
Mastricht
Gilson
Trueman

1600’s

Lucas Trelcatius

Quoted in Richard Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 3.221

“the principle first and pure act, of whom all things are wrought, and by whom all things are capable of movement.”

William Ames

Marrow of Theology (Baker, 1997), bk. 1, ch. 6, sect. 13, p. 92

“God is rather most pure act, Jas. 1:17.”

Edward Leigh

A System, or Body of Divinity… p. 223

“In respect of the object and effects, for God does never so many and so great works, but He can do more and greater; although we must hold that God cannot make a creature of infinite perfection simply, or creatures indeed infinite in number, for so they should be gods; for the divine power is so far exercised on the object as the passive power of the object extends itself, but infinite perfection imports a pure act.”

Richard Baxter

Catholic Theology (London: White, 1675), sect. 3, ‘The several inadequate conceptions which in order make up our knowledge of God’, p. 4

“24. III. And the existence of this divine essence must be known by us in this gradual threefold conception: 1. In virtute (vel potentia) [in virtue or power], 2. In actu immanente [in an immanent act], 3. In actione transeunte [in a transitive action].

Of the first I shall say no more than what is said before. By the second I mean God’s own most perfect essence as active in itself, without extrinsic effect or object. By the third, I mean not the creature, or the divine action ut recipitur in passo [as it is received in the patient], or the effect, but the divine essence itself in the state of agency ad extra [toward what is outside]; which the schools conclude to be eternal, though the effect is but in time. Yet if any will call this a free and not a necessary state of the divine essence, I contend not.

25. IV. The essential immanent acts of God are three: 1. Sibi vivere [to live to Himself], or to be essential active life in Himself; 2. Se intelligere [to understand Himself], to know Himself; 3. Se amare [to love Himself], or to be amor sui [self-love].”

Francis Turretin

Institutes of Elenctic Theology, vol. 1, 3.7.4

“from his activity, because He is a most pure act having no passive admixture and therefore rejecting all composition.”

Peter van Mastricht

Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God
(Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), p. 117

“All the attributes in God denote one most simple act.”

1900’s

Etienne Gilson

The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), p. 97. Gilson is a Romanist.

“To say that God is absolutely simple, since He is the pure act of existing, is not to have a concept of such an act, but to deny Him, as we have seen, any composition whatsoever.”

2000’s

Carl Trueman

‘The Reception of Thomas Aquinas in Seventeenth-Century Reformed Orthodoxy & Anglicanism’ in The Oxford Handbook of the Reception of Aquinas, p. 212

“Indeed the notion of God as simple, as Him being pure act, and as thus being perfect in terms of having no potentiality, is an obvious point of continuity between Thomas and the Reformed.”

Historical

On the Post-Reformation

Article

Cleveland, Christopher – ch. 2, ‘The Thomistic Concept of God as Pure Act in John Owen’ in Thomism in John Owen Pre (Routledge, 2013), pp. 27-69

On the Distinction Between Passive Power (Denied) & Active Power (Affirmed) About God

Article

2000’s

Feser, Edward – pp. 42-43 in ‘1.1.3 Divisions of Act & Potency’ in Scholastic Metaphysics: a Contemporary Introduction (Editiones Scholasticae, 2014)

Feser here explains and illustrates the distinction with regard to everyday things, which is necessary to understand before the concept is applied to God.

Quotes

Order of

Aquinas
Baxter
Turretin
Feser

1200’s

Aquinas – Summa, Pt. 1, Question 25, ‘The Power of God’

Article 1

“I answer that, Power is twofold—namely, passive, which exists not at all in God; and active, which we must assign to Him in the highest degree. For it is manifest that everything, according as it is in act and is perfect, is the active principle of something: whereas everything is passive according as it is deficient and imperfect. Now it was shown above (I:3:2; I:4:1 and I:4:2), that God is pure act, simply and in all ways perfect, nor in Him does any imperfection find place. Whence it most fittingly belongs to Him to be an active principle, and in no way whatsoever to be passive. On the other hand, the notion of active principle is consistent with active power. For active power is the principle of acting upon something else; whereas passive power is the principle of being acted upon by something else, as the Philosopher says (Metaph. v, 17). It remains, therefore, that in God there is active power in the highest degree.

Reply to Objection 1. Active power is not contrary to act, but is founded upon it, for everything acts according as it is actual: but passive power is contrary to act; for a thing is passive according as it is potential. Whence this potentiality is not in God, but only active power.”

Article 3

“Reply to Objection 1. God is said to be omnipotent in respect to His active power, not to passive power, as was shown above (Article 1). Whence the fact that He is immovable or impassible is not repugnant to His omnipotence.”

1600’s

Richard Baxter

Catholic Theology (London: White, 1675), sect. 3, ‘The several inadequate conceptions which in order make up our knowledge of God’, p. 4

“22. II. And the formal conceptus ‘Vita’ must itself be conceived of in this threefold inadequate conception: 1. Potentia-Actus [power-act], 2. Intellectus [understanding], 3. Voluntas [will]. I call the first Potentia-Actus to avoid concretes, and to signify that as God has no potentia passiva [passive power], so his potentia activa [active power] is not an idle, ceasing power, but in perpetual perfect act; and that act is a most powerful act: so that neither potentia alone, nor actus alone, but both together, are our best conception of this first principle in the Deity. And I take it for granted that even in man’s soul, the potentia vitalis activa [vital active power], the intellect, and the will, are not, as Thomas thought, accidents, but the formal essence of the soul, as the Scotists and Nominalists better say. And I have largely elsewhere proved this, and therefore stand not here upon it.”

Francis Turretin

Institutes of Elenctic Theology, Topic 3, Q. 21, ‘The Power of God’, p. 245

“II. It is not queried whether passive power (which is the principle of suffering from another) may be granted in God. Since this cannot be supposed without imperfection and change, it is evident that it should be removed far from him. Nor if the generation of the Son or the spiration of the Spirit is expressed in passive terms, does it immediately follow that there is in God passive power (since this denotes a mere relation [schesin] to the persons generating and spirating). But we treat only of the active power, the principle of acting on another.”

2000’s

Edward Feser

Five Proofs of the Existence of God (Ignatius Press, 2017), ‘The Divine Attributes’, ‘Unity’

“For suppose we agree that its [God’s] existence involved no actualization of potential. Might not we still say that its activity involved the actualization of potential? Might not we thus say that while it had no potentialities with respect to its existence, it does have potentialities with respect to its activity (such as its activity of actualizing the existence of other things)?

There are several problems with this suggestion, however, one of which might be obvious now that we have set out the principle agere sequitur esse [action follows being], according to which what a thing does reflects what it is. If the first cause of things exists in a purely actual way, how could it act in a less than purely actual way? How could its acting involve potentiality any more than its existence does?

A thing’s existence is, after all, what is metaphysically most fundamental about it; everything else follows from that. In this case we are talking about something whose very existence is purely actual and devoid of potentiality. So, from where in its nature are the (metaphysically less fundamental) potentialities for activity that the critic suggests it has supposed to derive?

Another problem with the suggestion in question is that to say of God that he has potentiality with respect to his activity, though not with respect to his existence, entails that God has parts—a purely actual part, and a part that is a potentiality. Now, as we saw in chapter 2, whatever has parts requires a cause. The reason is that the whole of which the parts are constituents is merely potential until actualized by some principle which combines the parts. This principle cannot be something intrinsic to the thing, for in that case it would be the cause of itself, which is incoherent. So, it must be something extrinsic to the thing.

Keep in mind that this is true even if we think of the thing in question as having always existed, since we still need some explanation of why the parts are combined at all regardless of how long they have been combined. Even if the thing had no temporally prior cause, it would still require an ontologically prior cause.

But to say of the first cause of things that it has a cause of its own is also incoherent, since if it has a cause of its own, it just isn’t really the first cause at all, and it isn’t what terminates the regress of a hierarchical series of the causes of the existence of things. For this reason too, then, there isn’t any sense to be made of the idea that God qua [as] first cause has potentialities with respect to his activity. So, again, God is purely actual, with no potentiality at all.”

Webpage

On Possibilities & Hypotheticals

See especially, Goudriaan, Aza – ‘Samuel Rutherford on the Divine Origin of Possibility’

How can God Change Things without being Changed?

Quote

2000’s

Edward Feser

Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), end of ch. 1

“Still, a critic might object that anything that actualizes another thing must be undergoing change itself in the course of doing so, and thus must have potentialities which need to be actualized. Thus (so the objection might go) the very notion of a purely actual actualizer is incoherent.

[1.] But one problem with this objection is that it simply begs the question. The Aristotelian argument for God’s existence claims to prove that no potential could be actualized at all unless there is a first actualizer, which is purely actual and thus devoid of potentiality. So, given that the premises of this argument are true and that the conclusion follows logically from them, it follows that the conclusion is true and therefore coherent.

Accordingly, it won’t do simply to insist that the conclusion must be false; one has to show specifically either that one of the premises is false or that the conclusion does not follow. Otherwise, one ought to admit that the argument shows precisely that a purely actual actualizer really is possible (since actual) after all.

[2.] Another problem is that the objection seems to be grounded in what logicians call a fallacy of accident. In our experience, when a thing changes another thing, it undergoes change itself; for instance, when your arm moves a stick, that is because your arm is itself moving in the process. Things in our experience thus actualize other things precisely by going from potential to actual themselves. But it doesn’t follow that absolutely anything that actualizes another thing must itself go from potential to actual.

That is like reasoning from the premise that every president of the United States has in fact been under seven feet tall to the conclusion that absolutely anyone who could ever become president must be under seven feet tall. That does not follow, because there is no essential connection between being president and being under seven feet tall, but only an accidental or contingent connection. And the connection would remain contingent even if the facts of biology make it extremely unlikely that there will ever be a president taller than seven feet.

Similarly, even if the actualizers of our experience are themselves mixtures of actual and potential, it simply doesn’t follow (for all the critic has shown) that there is an essential, as opposed to merely contingent, connection between being an actualizer and being a mixture of actual and potential.

[3.] Besides, it is hardly as if the notion of a purely actual actualizer were somehow paradoxical, as (say) the notion of an “immortal mortal” would be. An “immortal mortal” would be something that both dies and does not die, which is self-contradictory. But a purely actual actualizer is something that actualizes other things without itself being actualized, and there is no self-contradiction in that idea.

Furthermore, the reason the actualizers of our experience are themselves being actualized even as they actualize other things is precisely because they are limited in the various ways entailed by being mixtures of actual and potential. For example, because an arm which moves a stick is actually at one point in space and only potentially at another, its potential to be at the other point in space has to be actualized by something else if it is to get the stick to that other point in space. But something which is pure actuality, devoid of all potentiality, would have no such limitations, and thus not need to be actualized itself as it is actualizing other things.”

Latin

Excerpts

1500’s

Zanchi, Jerome – pp. 65 (rt col, mid), 95 (lt col, mid), 102 (rt col, mid), 109 (rt col, bot), etc. in Of the Nature of God, or of the Divine Attributes, in 5 Books (Heidelberg, 1577)

1600’s

Voet, Gisbert – p. 73 (1/3 way down), 265 (2.) in Part 5 of the Select Disputations… (Utrecht, 1669)

Baxter, Richard – p. 133 in pt. 1, ch. 4 in A Method of Christian Theology (London: White, 1681)

Articles

1500’s

Riolan, Sr., Jean – Short Metaphysical Works (Paris: 1598)

5. Whether God is the First Mover, where is of the Rise & Destruction of the World 28.b
6. Whether Potential is Prior to Act [No] 36.b
7. Whether God is Pure Act 37.b – 39

Riolan (1538-1605) was a French reformed physician and anatomist.

1600’s

Alsted, Johann Heinrich – Disputatio Metaphysica De Substantia Increata (Herborne, 1615)

Theorem 7, An act is either directed to an accomplishing power [potentia], or is said to be an immunity from all potential [potentia] 17

Theorem 8, An act which is more pure, that is simpler 18-20

Baron, Robert – 3. ‘The 3rd Division of Real Being: it is Explicated in what Way God is Pure Act’ in Philosophy being a Handmaiden to Theology… (1621), Exercitation 1, ‘On Being & Essence’, pp. 8-12

Voet, Gisbert – ‘The Simplicity that we have said is competent to God we prove by these reasons…’ in ‘Of the Only & Most Simple Essence of God’ in Part 1 of the Select Theological Disputations... (Utrecht, 1648), pp. 227-9

Schubart, Johann & ‎Heinrich A. Kestner – Discursus Metaphysicus de Actu Puro Ref (Literis Wertherianis, 1665)

This appears Lutheran as the University of Jena is associated with it.

Related Pages

Metaphysics

A Proof for God using Pure Actuality

Of God, the Knowledge of God & of his Attributes

On Divine Simplicity

On the Affections of God

On Absolute & Relative Attributes

That Wrath & Hatred are Not Properly in God

Trinity

On the Will of God