The Divine Attributes: What Reason Can Know of the First Cause

The five ways and related demonstrations establish a first principle of changing, caused, contingent and ordered reality. The conclusion is not yet the full revealed doctrine of the Trinity, Incarnation or grace. Those mysteries require God’s word. But the conclusion is already rich. If the first cause had unrealized potency, depended upon parts, received existence, lacked a perfection required by its causal work, or changed from one state to another, it would itself require an explanation and would not be first.

The order matters. We first remove from God the limitations proper to creatures: composition, matter, change, dependence and finitude. This is the negative way. We then affirm in Him the perfections that do not as such imply limitation: being, unity, truth, goodness, intelligence and will. This is the way of eminence. Finally, we recognize that the perfections are in God neither in exactly the same mode as in creatures nor in a wholly unrelated sense. They are predicated analogically: creatures possess received and limited goodness; God is goodness without reception or limit.

A changing thing is composed of actuality and potency: it is actually one way and potentially another. The first unmoved mover cannot contain passive potency, because what is in potency requires something actual to actualize it. The first cause is therefore pure act. This does not mean frantic activity. It means the complete absence of unrealized capacity, defect and dependence.

Matter and form cannot compose the first cause, because matter is a principle of potency and individuation. Nor can subject and accidental qualities compose Him, since an accident is received by a subject and can be gained or lost. Nor can essence and existence be distinct in Him. In every finite being, what the thing is does not explain that it is; existence is received. The first cause cannot receive existence from another. In Him essence is not a capacity for existence: He is subsistent being itself.

Divine simplicity also guards the unity of the attributes. God does not have goodness as one feature, intelligence as another and power as a third. His being is His goodness, His intelligence and His power, though the human mind must approach the one simple reality through distinct concepts derived from effects. This is why no attribute can conflict with another. Mercy is not a relaxation of justice, nor power an arbitrary rival to wisdom.

Why simplicity does not make God empty

Creaturely richness often comes by composition: a body has organs, a mind acquires knowledge, a character gathers virtues. It is tempting to imagine simplicity as poverty. The inference is reversed in God. Parts are needed where no part contains the perfection of the whole. The first cause possesses perfection in one unlimited act; composition would diminish rather than enrich Him.

Whatever perfection exists in an effect must be found in its adequate cause either formally, in the same kind, or eminently, in a higher mode capable of producing it. The first universal cause of being cannot lack the pure perfections found in creatures: actuality, truth, goodness, intelligence and life. It contains them without the limitations by which creatures receive them.

God’s infinity is not endless spatial extension. Space belongs to bodies, and extension implies divisible quantity. Divine infinity means that actuality is not received into a limiting essence. A creature has this act of being according to this nature and measure. Subsistent being is not contracted by a recipient. Therefore no finite boundary limits the perfection of the first cause.

This distinction prevents both pantheism and deism. God is not the sum of the world, because the world is composed, changing and finite. Nor is He a distant craftsman sharing the same order of being as His artifacts. He causes the whole act by which creatures exist. His transcendence is therefore greater than spatial remoteness, and His intimacy to creatures is greater than physical contact.

Being and goodness are convertible: a thing is good insofar as it is actual and perfective. Evil is not a positive nature standing beside good; it is a privation of due perfection in a subject that is good insofar as it exists. Since God is subsistent and unlimited actuality, He is not merely good by participation. He is goodness itself.

Every agent acts for an end, and every appetite tends toward a perceived good. Finite goods attract because they possess a limited participation in perfection. The rational will cannot be finally satisfied by any restricted good, because it can recognize the limitation and desire a more complete good. The ultimate end must therefore be the universal good, known and loved without defect.

God’s goodness is diffusive without need. He does not create to acquire a perfection He lacks. Creation is a free communication of participated being. This is why divine goodness and freedom belong together: creatures are truly intended and loved, yet God is not completed by them. Their dependence is total; His perfection is unchanged.

The goodness of God also grounds the apologetic principle of continuity. A good and provident Creator does not order rational creatures to truth and beatitude while allowing the public knowledge of the true religion to vanish entirely from the earth. After sin, the explicit economy of revelation develops, but the line of true worship remains: first parents, patriarchs, covenant, Christ and Church. Later religions must therefore be judged by whether they join or contradict that continuous order.

Change requires potency. A subject changes because it can receive an actuality it does not yet possess or lose one it has. Pure act contains no passive potency and therefore cannot change. God does not become wiser, better, more present or more determined. He does not pass from ignorance to knowledge or from indecision to choice.

Immutability does not mean inactivity or indifference. God causes changing effects by one eternal act. A craftsman’s changing work often requires changing intention because his power and knowledge are finite. The divine act is not successively adjusted. Different effects occur in time according to the one intelligible order eternally willed.

Eternity follows. Time measures change according to before and after. What is wholly immutable does not possess life piece by piece. Divine eternity is the complete and simultaneous possession of interminable life. God knows temporal events in their order without waiting for them to arrive. His eternity includes every time without becoming one time among others.

Does prayer change God?

Prayer changes creatures and belongs to the order God eternally wills. He wills not only effects but real secondary causes, including free petitions. The answer follows the prayer without requiring a new divine decision. Providence includes the petition as a means.

Two beings differ either because one has something the other lacks, because their received natures are multiplied in distinct subjects, or because matter individuates them. None of these principles can divide subsistent being itself. If two alleged first causes differed by a perfection, one would lack it and would not be infinite. If they were instances of one common nature, each would receive that nature and would not be the first unreceived source.

Divine unity is therefore stronger than numerical solitude. God is not one member of a class called gods. He is outside every genus and is the unique source from which every finite participation in being proceeds. Polytheism necessarily assigns limited domains, genealogies, bodies, passions or conflicts to its gods and thereby describes exalted creatures rather than the first cause.

The unity of God also implies the unity of truth and final worship. Contradictory religions cannot be equally willed as final revelations of the same God. Differences of rite can express one faith, but contradictory assertions about whether God is personal, whether the world is created, whether Christ is divine or whether the person survives death cannot all be true.

Intelligence appears in finite rational creatures as an immaterial power able to receive universal forms without becoming materially identical to the objects known. An entirely material first cause could not account for the ordered intelligibility of nature or for intellect as an effect. The first immaterial cause must possess intellectual perfection eminently.

God does not learn from creatures. His knowledge is not caused by objects acting upon Him. He knows Himself perfectly, and in knowing His own essence as the universal source of being He knows every way in which that essence can be imitated by finite creatures. He knows possible beings, actual beings, causes, free acts and the whole order of history.

Divine knowledge does not abolish contingency. God knows necessary events as necessary, contingent events as contingent and free acts as free. His knowledge is infallible because it is the cause and measure of created truth, not because creatures are reduced to mechanical necessity.

Truth in creatures is conformity of intellect and reality. God is first truth because His knowledge and being are identical and because every created intelligibility derives from His exemplary knowledge. Human reason is therefore not an accident in an irrational cosmos; it is ordered to being because both mind and world proceed from intelligence.

Will is intellectual appetite: the inclination toward the good as known. Since God knows perfect goodness in Himself, He necessarily wills and loves Himself. This necessity is not compulsion; it is the identity of perfect knowledge and perfect good. He cannot prefer evil or deficiency to His own infinite goodness.

God wills creatures freely. No finite effect is necessary to complete Him, and no particular created order exhausts His power. He chooses to communicate being according to wisdom. This freedom excludes both emanationism, in which the world flows necessarily from the divine, and caprice, in which choice lacks intelligible order.

Divine love is the willing of good. God’s love causes the goodness of creatures rather than being awakened by a perfection independent of Him. He loves each thing according to the place assigned within providence and rational creatures in a special way as capable of knowing and loving Him.

Because the divine will is identical with wisdom and goodness, commands cannot be arbitrary. Natural law expresses the rational order of human nature to its true goods and final end. Revelation elevates and specifies that order; it does not turn contradiction or moral evil into good.

Active power follows actuality. Since God is pure and infinite act, His causal power is not restricted by matter, instrument or a more universal agent. He can produce every effect that does not involve contradiction. A contradiction is not a difficult thing beyond omnipotence; it is no possible thing at all. God cannot make a square circle or make a past event not to have occurred because the words fail to signify a coherent object of power.

Creation is the radical exercise of this power: the production of the whole substance and act of being without presupposed matter. Conservation is not a second, weaker act added later. A creature continues to exist only while the first cause communicates existence. If that causal dependence ceased, the creature would not merely move elsewhere; it would cease to be.

For this reason God is present everywhere, not as a body spread through space, but as the immediate sustaining cause. He is present by power because all effects remain subject to Him, by presence because all things are known to Him, and by essence because He causes and preserves the act of being of each. His transcendence does not produce absence.

Justice gives what is due according to right order. Nothing outside God imposes a debt upon Him before creation, yet once He freely wills natures, promises and an order of providence, His fidelity is unfailing. He gives each creature what His wisdom assigns and never contradicts His truth or goodness.

Mercy is goodness relieving defect and misery. In creatures mercy may seem opposed to strict justice because resources are limited and judgement imperfect. In God mercy is more fundamental: every created good is first gratuitous. Even when justice punishes disorder, the existence, powers and opportunities of the creature remain gifts.

The mystery of evil cannot be solved by denying either attribute. Moral evil is permitted because a world containing free rational causality is a real good and because providence can order permitted defects to greater goods without becoming their author. Suffering can be punitive, medicinal, evidential, sacrificial or a consequence of finite nature. Revelation will disclose more, but reason already excludes a God who positively wills evil as evil.

Providence is the plan in the divine intellect by which things are ordered to their ends; government is the execution of that order in creatures. Because God is universal cause, nothing falls outside providence. Yet He governs according to the natures He gives. Physical causes act physically, living things through vital powers, and rational creatures through knowledge and freedom.

Providence does not require that every event be pleasant or that every error be immediately suppressed. It requires that the order as a whole remain subject to wisdom and that rational creatures are never abandoned without the means proportionate to their vocation. Natural reason and law remain; grace can act beyond visible boundaries; public revelation develops through a continuous historical line.

This principle bears directly on comparative religion. The true religion cannot be one that appears late after the total extinction of all prior truth. From the first parents, sacrifice, promise and invocation persist; after the Flood the line continues through Noah and Melchizedek; Abraham and Israel receive explicit covenant; Christ fulfils it; the Church perpetuates His mission. A later system may preserve fragments, but if it contradicts this line and cannot produce public divine authentication, it cannot be the universal saving revelation.

Indefectibility is the revealed completion of this philosophical expectation. Natural theology establishes that God is good, truthful and provident. Christ then publicly promises that the gates of hell will not prevail, that He will remain with His disciples to the end, and that the Spirit will guide the apostolic body. The theory of a total apostasy therefore contradicts both the prior divine attributes and the later explicit promises.