In the tradition we are considering it was taken almost for granted that God’s knowing is His doing, or put the other way around, God does things through His knowing. (Katheryn Rogers, "The Traditional Doctrine of Divine Simplicity," Religious Studies 32:2 (June 1996): 174)
The question remains: How can God, Who is a person, possibly be an act? If actions are what people do, it seems obvious that a person cannot be an action. (Ibid.: 172)
In this journal article by Katheryn Rogers (which you can only access if you have ATLA or some other method to access the article), Rogers made some interesting points concerning the doctrine of divine simplicity as understood by her. What is rather interesting to me is how she takes the classical theist view that God is pure act and puts it with the idea that in God there is only one single act (assuming simplicity), which means God's actions are one and immutable. I do not believe that is how classical theists actually understand purus actus, but I could be wrong. In my view, there seems to be a categorical confusion on Rogers' part.
To my understanding, God as pure act (purus actus) has to be understood in the way it is formulated. It is based on Aristotelian ideas of actuality and potentiality. God being pure act means there is no potentiality in God. Any potentiality has the potential to become actual, thus the presence of a potential implies mutability and imperfection. God as pure act simply means that God is fully actual, with no potential.
There is no doubt that the words "actual" and "act" are cognate words. Nevertheless, that does not imply that one is always related to the other. The ideas of actuality and potentiality, while related to action, deals with the nature of a being. Actualization is the process by which what is potential become actual. But if action merely refers to doing, then it seems that action as a "doing verb" can have no relation to actualize as a "being verb." Again, there seems to be an assumption that act follows being, which seem to come from Aristotelian final causation, but what if we reject that? Then act does not necessarily follow being, and as such God's actions is independent of the issue of God being purus actus.
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