Vindiciae Actus Purus

A Defense of the Thomistic Doctrine

For the Academic Paper form with full citations, see here.

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. For instance, the misgiving that traditional Western theology gives us an impersonal deity, or that this or that attribute of God (knowledge or purpose) requires sequence, or that eternal generation implies ontological division between the Trinitarian Persons and consequently the inferiority of both the Son and the Holy Spirit. More will be required to answer these challenges than this Thomist conception, but I will argue that pure actuality is a resource that ought not be neglected in any serious response. That is the burden that this paper aims to satisfy, and yet it is incumbent upon the classical theologian to first defend the idea itself. Not everyone accepts the doctrine. 

My thesis will be 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.

In demonstrating this claim I will first define the concept and distinguish from some misunderstandings; second, I will take up the exegetical challenge, discussing criteria for an attribute where explicit terms cannot be located; third, we will expand our exegetical field to relate to passages on eternal generation where, I will argue, pure act is in play; fourth, I will answer some standard objections to the doctrine; fifth, deal more in-depth with the post-Barthian division between God’s being in himself versus his being in act; sixth and finally, offer a sketch of how God in pure act begins to situate the personal actions of God such as we see in the biblical narrative. Given limitations of the paper, I will restrict this last discussion to how divine impassibility in particular can cohere with the personality of God in the biblical narrative.   

DEFINING OUR TERMS IN A THOMISTIC MODE

What exactly does “act” mean anyway? An act can mean to be and live, as to what is interior, and then to bring about change in what is exterior. It will be objected that even interior motions are motions, and motions necessarily imply change. However, this allegedly necessary implication is forced, whether unwittingly or by sleight of hand, back into the previous premise where the whole question is begged. There is little doubt that in motion there must be changes in state; yet the classical position is that the interior life of God—that is to be and to live—is not “motion” in that contingent and sequential sense. Such words are spoken analogically, as we already grant about so many other words ascribed to the essence of God.

Thomas Aquinas spoke not merely of God in act, but as pure act (actus purus). What does this mean? His first of the five ways to show God’s existence gives us the reason why it is necessary to move from ordinary motion to a Prime Mover. The relevant step is where Thomas says this: “Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion; whereas a thing moves inasmuch as it is in act. For motion is nothing else than the reduction of something from potentiality to actuality. But nothing can be reduced from potentiality to actuality, except by something in a state of actuality.” Potentiality is exactly what it appears to be. A thing has a nature, and that nature has within it the potential to become something else—not radically different, but something in which the substantial matter takes on a different form. 

We can pause here and consider an example. An ordinary pile of lumber is potentially a bookshelf, just as the completed bookshelf is the actualization of that formal cause in the builder’s mind. However there was a third “state” of motion required to set that which was merely potential to act. This third thing was a saw moving back and forth. The remainder of Thomas’ argument is elementary. In considering the saw and the wood, yet another third substance-in-act is sought. It is the arm of the craftsman, and so on, ad infinitum.

Except that Thomas insists that there cannot be such an infinite regress in act, or else nothing else in the following sequence would act. In fact, no other effect would ever come to be. Act and potency are not metaphysical equals, but “absolutely speaking act is prior to potency.”

It is from Thomas’ third question in the Summa, on the simplicity of God, that we are brought to the real theological import of pure act. Here Thomas is offering a few reasons why composition in God would imply a prior cause. He says, “because the first being must of necessity be in act, and in no way in potentiality. For although any single thing that passes from potentiality to actuality, the potentiality is prior in time to the actuality; nevertheless, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality; for whatever is in potentiality can be reduced into actuality only by some being in actuality. Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality.” This is the key. He goes on to show how composition endangers this. For our purposes, we need only focus on the proposed absurdity of there being potentiality in God. It is here that actus purus is maintained as a necessary truth about God’s essence. 

What becomes plain in the many philosophical objections against the incommunicable attributes of God is that the notion of sequence is assumed to be unavoidable. Of course sequence implies potentiality and therefore parts. Dolezal says about simplicity what is equally true about pure act: “It is founded on the conviction that the first cause of being cannot itself be determined ‘to be’ in any way by another and that God is the wholly sufficient reason for himself.” Immediately, then, we discern that the aseity, immutability, infinity, and perfection of God are all logically consequent to pure actuality. If there is any potentiality in God, then it would follow that he is dependent on that substance in act prior to him (contra aseity), it would change him from potency to act (contra immutability), in that which was a limit and defect to his being (contra infinity and perfection).

Several Reformed Scholastics could be quoted to show that this was basically assumed as essential to orthodoxy. For instance, Lucas Trelcatius spoke of God as “the principle first and pure act, of whom all things are wrought, and by whom all things are capable of movement.” Turretin argues in the same way as Thomas with respect to divine simplicity: “from his activity, because he is a most pure act having no passive admixture and therefore rejecting all composition.” And for Mastricht, “All the attributes in God denote one most simple act.” It should be said at this point that this concept does not transgress the via negativa that is at the core of Thomas’ move from natural theology to the doctrine of specially revealed attributes. Here we are still moving a posteriori, from effects, and concluding in what must not be said about God.

As Gilson wrote, “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.”

For instance, when Thomas defines what it means for God to be in two ways — 1. “The act of essence” and 2. The intellect’s joining of predicate to subject — since we cannot know the simple essence of the first, we must resort to the composite nature of the second, the data of which is gathered from God’s effects.

A few more things should be said about what pure act does not mean. The idea may be interpreted as necessitating an infinity of motions such that “each motion” ought never end. This mistakes the ultimacy of this act as some maximal “amount” in activity, whether in number or extension. So the most obvious objection one could make is to start with the assumption that action just is sequence of motions. But Turretin makes a worthwhile distinction in speaking of eternal generation: “The generation therefore may well be said to be terminated by a termination of perfection, not by a termination of duration.”

One could make the opposite objection: that is, that Thomists only arrive at a God of Pure Act by concluding with a First Mover; but a First Mover is not himself moved. So the concept is incoherent the other way, as God could not “get himself moving,” anymore than anything beyond him could reduce him from potentiality to act. However, Feser remarks, “an unmoved mover of the sort we’ve been describing is not and cannot be ‘unmoved’ in the sense of being in repose, precisely because it is that which actualizes the potencies of second causes. It is active, not ‘at rest.’”

Pure act is also not to be understood as Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover that can do no other but contemplate himself. There was an understandable reason for this in Aristotle’s mind. Since the First Mover could not himself be in motion, such a Mover could not be the immediate efficient cause of the world, but could move all things by being its own end cause. So “the unmoved mover moves the heavenly bodies as the good moves us, as the object of their desire and love.”

Since Aristotle had no personal conception of the relationship between God and the cosmos, we should not confuse this notion with what Jonathan Edwards would argue was God’s end in creating the world. While Edwards could sound similar at this point, he would say that the glory of God was that chief end, which is to say that God has himself as that end.

The pagan must resort to the language of “it” and no real purpose uniting the cause to his effects. The use by modern theologians of such labels as “static” to describe the God known along the via negativa has something like this in mind. When pure actuality is described in a Thomist mode, what might be conceived by critics is the modern King of England who “reigns but doesn’t rule.” 

In conclusion of our basic definition work, Feser clues us in on another divine attribute that requires pure actuality: “Consider now that to have power is just to be able to make something happen, to actualize some potential. But then, since the cause of the existence of all things is pure actuality itself rather than merely one actual thing among others, and it is the source of all the actualizing power anything else has, it has all possible power. It is omnipotent.” Put another way, if power is act, and God has all power, then it follows that he is the First Cause of all actualization. But if he caused his own actualization, then there was (contra eternity) when some part (contra simplicity) of God was not actualized. 

EXEGESIS 1: PURE ACT AND OTHER DIVINE ATTRIBUTES

We should begin by clearing the air about reasonable and unreasonable standards. As with divine simplicity and impassibility, so it is here that we have a concept that admits no explicit formulation in any biblical text. We can acknowledge that the words “pure actuality” are not Bible words. To many this automatically precludes any exegetical support that could ground the doctrine in special revelation. Supposing we respond with the reminder that neither are the words “Trinity” or “monotheism” or “covenant of works” in the explicit words of Scriptures. Then it will not be unjustly said that there is a difference in this case. Those concepts may be demonstrated in short order by only a few premises, each premise bolstered by a dozen or more verses. Can we say the same of pure act? We must admit that we cannot; or, at least, we cannot arrive by so short a road. 

Before offering examples of texts to work with, I would first propose the following criteria.

If any attribute (A) is conceded to be a necessary corollary of pure act (P), and if (A) is seen to be clearly taught by Scripture, then it must follow that (P) is necessitated by that same Scripture. This will be true whether (A) is understood to be antecedent in that logical relationship to (P), or if (A) is the consequent of (P).

A full justification of my hermeneutical method exceeds this study. Therefore I am content to paraphrase David Yeago, where he says that theological reflection is not simply a repetition of biblical words. It is rather using conceptual terms “to render accurate judgments about the patterns of Scripture, and specifically its talk about God.” 

There are two sets of texts into which I would arrange this exegetical survey: 1. texts that more obviously represent “activity” in the sense of the divine will; 2. texts that have been put forward by others in support of eternal generation. In the first of these sets, it will be more or less clear why these would speak to divine action. It is the second set that will take some explaining, and that will be done in that section. 

We should proceed by relating pure act to other truths we know about the one divine essence. We will examine its relationship to aseity (Romans 11:33-36), to life (John 1:4, 5:26, 14:6), and to the divine counsel (Eph. 1:11).

I have already essentially demonstrated that aseity implies actus purus and vice versa. Granting that point, it follows that any text clearly upholding aseity also disallows divine potentiality in whatever attribute the verse is ascribing to God. For instance, in Romans 11:33-36, Paul disallows any contribution to divine counsel, whether in knowledge or in wisdom. If the mind of God is supplemented in the least “unit” of knowledge or wisdom, then the divine counsel is dependent. God would not be a se, or in Paul’s language, all things would not be “from him” (v. 36).

But a decree from counsel is an act, and such an act could not have been in potentiality, activated by another. Nor can we say that God’s counsel acted “first” such that the decree was a subsequent effect of the counsel. It follows from this reasoning that, while Romans 11:33-36 does not articulate pure act, it nevertheless demands pure act.

There are also implications for actus purus, of God having life and love in himself. So in John’s Gospel, we are told about the Son of God, that, “In him was life” (1:4) and “as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (5:26). Jesus goes as far as to identify himself as “the life” (14:6). These three texts give us three much needed, and at least partly unique, perspectives on the life of God. The difference between 1:4 and 14:6 is obvious enough. Life can be considered as a possession of the Son, and then again it is claimed as his identity. Taken together, what else is there to do but agree with the classical theological distinction that it is the essence of God to be. This is as true of the Son as it is of the Father. In Augustinian terminology, it is not one thing for the Son to be alive and another thing for him to be, but the two are one. That by itself argues for the perfection of the act of living.

The question of how to reconcile, on the one hand, that God could be free to create whatever world he wants (or not to create at all), and yet that God is omniscient and the divine decree immutable—this seems to be the ultimate opposition of freedom and necessity. However it is resolved, it is difficult to see how the resolution escapes being an iteration of pure act, whether or not this term is used.

Muller summarizes Aquinas on this point: “For God’s eternal mind and will are immutable: the world must necessarily exist, but this is a necessity of the consequence or of supposition, resting upon the divine counsel or decision to create.” Hodge at least agreed this much: that the divine decree is immutable and yet “opposed to the doctrine of necessity, which assumes that God acts by a mere necessity of nature, and that all that occurs is due to the law or development or of self-manifestation of the divine being.” 

Thus one must hold that God is wholly free in creation, and that, necessarily, whatever he creates will be in accord with all that he is. These necessities are logical distinctions concerning that which is consequent to his free act. That is part of the puzzle with more explicit scriptural support, linking counsel to his good pleasure as Paul does (Eph. 1:11). On the other hand, such divine counsel and will must also suffer from no potentiality. If “the object of the intellect is the true; the object of the will is the good,” and if in God the subject is never divisible from the object, then it follows that the divine knowledge and will are in pure act, as God can never cease to think of the true, nor be unwilling of the good.  

EXEGESIS 2: PURE ACT AND ETERNAL GENERATION AND PROCESSION

Trinitarian generation and procession texts all imply pure act; and yet there is an obvious difficulty on the front end. Which texts constitute legitimate eternal generation or procession texts? John 5:26 is conceived by many as an eternal generation text. D. A. Carson is one recent scholar who has made this case. While the life of the Father is “granted” to the Son, and though appearing to refer to a point in time and thus restricting itself to the human nature of Christ, Carson highlights that the traditional reading had something going for it. This “life in himself” is equated, in the words “as” and “so,” to that life possessed by the Father and thus a life which must have no potentiality. But then that which the Father gives to the Son is an act with no beginning. Now the great hurdle to clear in this text is more contextual than the question of correctly rendering monogenes. Will the economic language of the Son’s role as giving life in his Two Advents (see verses 24-25, 29) allow eternal generation to be the most natural reading? 

Hodge is particularly exacting against the patristic and medieval exegesis on what “begotten” must mean. For him, even though eternal generation must be affirmed as a doctrine, the Scripture is silent as to its exact nature. Whatever the case may be about eternal generation in John 5:26, at least the Father having life in himself excludes any merely potential life. Supposing one chooses to emphasize, with Calvin, the aseity of the Son, that he is God of himself (autotheos). This will be one more angle on the impossibility of potentiality in God, only now with respect to the eternal Son. In that case, it will not be eternal generation that grounds pure act, but the life of the Son a se. In his own commentary of John 5:26, Calvin concludes about the Son, “that this title is strictly applied to Christ, so far as he was manifested in the flesh,” yet though he would not envision this in eternal generation terms, he describes this divine attribute as a “fountain of life … containing in himself the fullness of life.”

Now the love of God will function in a similar manner to the divine life, except that it will also bear a clearer relationship to the internal operations within the Trinity. 1 John 4:8 says that “God is love.” Here we have identity and possession in one act.

Why is this act? To love necessarily implies subject and object, even granting Warfield’s pushback against Trinitarian analogies that overplay their hand on the subject-object distinction. Divine love would be pure act even if one was to appeal to divine simplicity, such that the subject of the God who loves and the supreme object of his love, namely Himself, is “all that is in God.” So again, the two are one.

We understand, however, that with the Trinity we are speaking of more than what is one in essence. We are also speaking of what is proper to the Persons, and now with specific emphasis on the object of divine love. 

I am not aware of any Trinitarian theologian—whether classical or open theist—who would deny that the love of God is at least an act. And who would say that this love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit ever suffers any imperfection? Even Gunton (leaning on Pannenberg) will interpret these same portions of John’s first epistle as speaking of such Trinitarian love. It is a love that “does not remain content with its eternal self-sufficiency because that self-sufficiency is the basis of a movement outwards to create and perfect a world whose otherness from God — of being distinctly itself — is based in the otherness-in-relation of Father, Son and Spirit in eternity.” Thus even when Barthians attempt to root divine attributes in the narrative actions, one must come back to the God who acts in se.  

We have already mentioned one of the great conundrums to classical theology proper: namely how God can be both free and immutable in both his knowledge and decree. It is not only classical theology that faces this challenge because of its insistence on holding to both divine freedom and those divine necessities; but the Barthians put themselves in the bind the other way, tying down the ontological processions to the economic missions. They may pay lip service to God in se, but their order of knowing has left behind a wholly self-sufficient God as unintelligible.

Pannenberg recognizes the ontological priority of the eternal act with respect to a more obvious attribute: “Does there not have to be a world of creatures, or a relation to it, if God is to be thought of as active?” he asks, but then comes the guardrails to aseity: “Christian doctrine denies this by describing the Trinitarian relations between Father, Son, and Spirit as themselves actions. To these divine actions in the creation of the world are added as actions of a different kind, as outward actions.” Hence, something like pure act becomes unavoidable in understanding how God could be free in himself. 

Leaving aside the particular ways in which the processions and missions might relate, in the instances such as life and light and freedom to create, it is the very idea of the internal relations that may serve as a bridge from classical categories to our present theological context.

Even if one does not think in terms of eternal generation, John 1:1 presses in upon us what it could mean that the Word both is God and yet with, or even “toward,” God.

Calvin approved of the rendering by Erasmus of “speech” for logos, and mentions in passing that the Latin Sermo would have been better than what the Vulgate had rendered Verbum. A more active speech would be implied, and that of the Son’s eternal subsistence. Matthew Henry’s comments on John’s use of logos are in an Augustinian vein: “There is the word conceived, that is, thought, which is the first and only immediate product and conception of the soul … and it is one with the soul. And thus the second person in the Trinity is fitly called the Word; for he is the first-begotten of the Father, that eternal essential Wisdom which the Lord possessed, as the soul does its thought, in the beginning of his way, Prov. 8:22.”

It is suspected that for such texts to teach eternal generation, it demands that we be able to explain what eternal generation is like. That is a much debated point, and one that only concerns us insofar as the concept relates to the eternal Godhead in some act. John Webster gives us a useful definition of eternal generation: “Eternal generation is the personal and eternal act of God the Father whereby he is the origin of the personal subsistence of God the Son, so communicating to the Son the one undivided divine essence.” 

When it comes to the language of “origin,” my own view will not depend on taking any sides between the fathers who spoke in this way or the Calvinistic autotheos emphasis. In passing I will say that, at the very least, we cannot take a position that implies any ontological beginning, or as determined by any analogy to earthly generation. Webster further says that, “this affirmation that begottenness is a divine perfection offers protection against what Tom Weinandy has called ‘emanationist sequentialism’: origin and order in the trine life are not a matter of ‘priority, precedence and sequence’.” Hodge and Warfield represent the Reformed wing that would place the guardrails of the mystery not at which conception one has of eternal generation or spiration, but rather at the limitations of what is specifically revealed.

My own position is to insist that the relations are at least pure act, but not to expand this act into a positive description of what the begottenness and spiration might be. 

Dolezal adds that, “divine relations are not accidents in God and that in fact they are really identical with the divine essence. Their act of existence (esse) is none other than the one pure act of the divine essence itself.” So this act is real being; and this being is not some ontology “back behind” the three Persons, but is the three Persons subsisting. Eternal generation is much more than pure act, but it is never less. If eternal generation implies neither ontological cause nor sequence, then it follows that eternal generation necessitates pure act. Whoever denies pure act must either deny eternal generation, or else conceive of a generation which leaves room for potentiality in the Son that was in need of actualization. 

Proverbs 8:22 and Micah 5:2 can be seen as two Old Testament passages in this link. In the first passage there are a few interpretive questions. Kidner poses the first in this way: “Is wisdom here conceived as a hypostasis (i.e. an actual heavenly being) or as a personification (i.e. an abstraction, made personal for the sake of poetic vividness).” He answers in the latter way. The church has traditionally answered in the former, namely, that the Wisdom of God the eternal Son. The next question concerns the exact Hebrew word used (qanah), whether “possessed” or “create.” All interpretive paths lead to pure act here, since the personification of wisdom that is created would not work.

The Micah passage is famously read at Christmas time. What is easy to miss is not the temporal “going forth” of the ruler as from little Bethlehem, but rather the words that follow: “whose coming forth is from of old, from ancient days.” If we take the side of the verse “ancient of days” figuratively for eternity, then we must be consistent with the other half of the same thought. A mere philological study comes up inconclusive. This is the “going forth” that would be eternal. If this is not eternal begottenness, or if it is and we cannot say more about it, we may at least affirm it as pure act. 

Let us look to what is among the clearest texts implying eternal generation: Hebrews 1:3. Here we have a brilliant proof text for the Nicene phrase, “Light from Light,” as the Son is “the radiance of the glory of God.” What is radiance but light from light? Moreover, if the Father is glorious and the Son “shines forth” the same, then the Son’s effulgence is not merely being but also act, both of the Father and of the Son in different respects. Calvin here adds his characteristic caution against “frivolous speculations” as to the essence of this radiance, nevertheless, that the inspired author “borrowed from nature” those images of illumination and impression are “fitly applied to God.”

We may tend not to think of light acting, although it is worth pausing over the fact that those most critical of actus purus will be modern theologians who 1. are motivated to maintain the utmost degree of personality of God and 2. would not likely deny that God is light, as that concept has a thoroughly biblical pedigree (Ps. 36:9; Jn. 1:5; 1 Jn. 1:5; Jas. 1:17).

Hence the modern theologian would put himself in an awkward corner to reject the fundamentally personal character of divine light. God is the “Father of lights” (Jas. 1:17) so that there is another immediate personal entry point to that “radiance” of Hebrews 1:3.  

One conceptual framework in which the act of light may be understood is in terms of the knowledge of God. Jonathan Edwards’ own Unpublished Essay on the Trinity alluded to the Hebrews 1:3 wording to suggest that the Son is the Father’s Idea of Himself, “the exact imprint of his nature.” But the knowledge of something comprehends more than a passive impress, as Warfield understands Edwards’ line of reasoning: “Ideas of such [spiritual] things, he urges, are just repetitions of them, so that he who has an idea of any act of love, fear, anger or any other act or motion of mind, simply so far repeats the motion in question; and if the idea be perfect and complete, the original motion of the mind is absolutely reduplicated.” This exactness of intellectual replication, Edwards calls “a most pure act.” Warfield sees this as inconclusive as a demonstration of natural theology, but not as a “positive rational support” to our knowledge of the doctrine once specially revealed. I suggest that, as the Son “knows the Father” (Mat. 11:27) and the Spirit “searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor. 2:10), that this Trinitarian act of knowing must never be without itself and thus necessitates pure act. 

In explaining why the Son’s generation is not an ontological starting point, Thomas insists that we must conceive of “a living thing whose life involves no development from potential to actual.” As a consequence of impassibility, Webster argues that, “the Father’s act of begetting is an eternal act, a begetting ante omnia saecula. The Son’s generation is eternal, because it is not ‘adventitious’, but intrinsic to God’s perfection. As such it is neither a completed act in the past, nor an act awaiting completion in the future.” 

There is, Webster says, a “required ontological shift — that of disassociating eternal begetting from movement from one state to another.” So, Turretin argued that the works of the Trinity ad intra are eternal and unceasing. “Otherwise, if personal acts had an end, they would also have a beginning, and all mutation in God could not be denied. As therefore in work they are perfect, so in operation they are perpetual.” 

OBJECTIONS AGAINST ACTUS PURUS IN GOD

Objections to this doctrine are something like the scriptural support for it. They will be indirect rather than direct. When once a Christian hears the basic reason Thomas had for God to be in pure act, it is natural to accept it as an intuitive corollary of immutability, or of God being the First Cause. It is only usually when some theistic philosopher is criticizing some related attribute (aseity, simplicity, atemporality, or impassibility) that pure act comes into the crosshairs. Four such objections will be considered here.  

The first objection is really the most long standing. It was substantively put to Augustine by different words: What was God doing before he made the world? This is obviously a more direct challenge to atemporality, but we need to see that it is calling into question any intelligible “doing” in which God is not relating to the world as we know it. First, let us review Augustine’s answer that gave us the classic formulation of time as a creature.

If God made time, then there was no “before” that time of creation. God’s “years” neither come nor go. “Your today is eternity … ‘This day I have begotten you,’ and “there was never a time when there was no time.”

Beyond that, the objection is really equivocating with the term “do,” as if it must be bound to sequence. Perhaps one might suggest better words than the word “do” here. However it simply begs the question to operate by the rationale that only lifeless, static, potential could characterize God before he started doing anything—that is, doing anything else.  

Sanders speaks of internal relations as if they solve the problems associated with what God “does” apart from the world. This raises the question of whether the internal relations run against the via negativa that Thomas had first charted. Or is it enough to say that paternity, filiation, and spiration are their proper acts of subsistence by being their proper modes of relation? If this is where one lands, then it is sufficient to say that this “doing,” or act, is the divine act of being, and any amount of descriptions of what that means can comfortably resort to the biblical descriptives of light and life and love and so forth.  

The second objection has already been anticipated, and that is that all act implies sequence. But sequence is opposed to those other classical attributes such as atemporality, immutability, impassibility, and simplicity. Therefore actus purus is incompatible with the other attributes that have traditionally been held together with it. 

As intuitive as the claim of this objection might seem, what we have here is nothing less than the question-begging fallacy. The classical position rejects that God’s personal knowledge of, and interaction with, the creature implies sequence in him. Likewise the classical view will deny that the internal relations involve any kind of sequence. Surely the critics know that the classical view maintains all of this.

That being the case, one cannot establish the necessity of sequence by assuming it in one’s premises. The burden of proof is not on the proponent of pure act, especially if he is content with the via negativa, to show what a non-sequential eternal act would “look” like. The one who would draw such an act out more positively will increase his burden, but in either case, there is no logical contradiction that the critic can establish.  

The third objection is that eternal processions are a composition of act and potency, and thus there is at least potentiality in the Person (the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively) in their reception of the operation. Dolezal explores this line of reasoning as a potential objection to divine simplicity. In the process, he inserts the premise: “Furthermore, the generation of the Son from the Father and the procession of the Spirit from Father and Son certainly seem to indicate a composition of act and potency.”

However, the internal operations in the Trinity are not divisible actions. Dolezal cites both Aquinas and some brief analysis by Gilles Emery to the effect that the “opposition” that we would normally call the subject-object distinction between the Persons, is a real distinction, but also a relative distinction. Rather than being a distinction between relation and essence (“real major distinction”), it is purely a matter of relation (“real minor distinction”).

The last objection is not a sophisticated logical problem, but rather the complaint that it “just does not make any sense.” Such an objection is not conceding to ineffability. Rather it is positively claiming that there can be no such thing. How can we affirm an act of which we can ascribe nothing but mode of relation? I say this objection itself is not in itself sophisticated. However it can arise out of a controversy that is quite sophisticated. For example, pure act may be offered as a way of defending divine simplicity against the most intricate kinds of critiques, such as Alvin Plantinga’s argument that it makes God identical to all of his properties. That in turn would make God dependent on these to exist, or else God’s properties would all be instances of each of the properties.

However, as Ed Feser and Katherine Rodgers have both pointed out, Plantinga wrongly conceives of the Thomist account as casting God with “properties” to begin with, rather than as the attributes really subsisting as one simpe act of being.

On the one hand, Sanders wants to place the internal processions “as something categorically greater than action,” describing “a very active Be-ing,” and so reserving the word action “for what God does with the world.” On the other hand, he recognizes that the classical tradition had good reasons for seeing the inward relations as undivided and yet act. The relations of origin are act; and by “origins” the sense is not a sequence of coming to be.

As it is, Thomas elsewhere distinguishes between two kinds of act: that of form and of operation. The latter is self-evident. He explains that action must also be form “inasmuch as the form is the principle and end of operation.” We can use the following example. A blueprint is the form of a house. No one would deny that the blueprint has being, yet someone might reply that this only represents the actual form (the idea) rather than itself (the piece of paper). We must then ask about this “actual form”: Does it have some existence or none? Our critic brought it up because the blueprint is neither self-existent nor self-created. What then is the form but the idea, and yet it manifested in physical sketch form by act. Now unlike the finite imagination of a human architect—not to mention the very static actualization of the form on the paper—that Idea by which God knows both himself and all that he will make is eternally known. Who could then deny that this act of divine knowledge has being beyond any becoming? 

GOD’S ACT IN SE ET AD EXTRA: A RESPONSE TO GUNTON

There is a basic Barthian misgiving about the classical view. This is not a direct assault on pure act, but is a more wholesale objection against the way of negation and metaphysical theology as such. In the “post-Barthian” mindset, it is the classical outlook that pits being against act. For Torrance, Christian theology is distinctly Trinitarian, and thus cannot be formulated “from some starting point of our own choosing or some alleged ground above or beyond the Holy Trinity.” Intense focus on those incommunicable attributes, such as pure act, strike the post-Barthian point of view both as speculative and as suggesting some more primal being behind the Trinity. Torrance and Gunton both conceive of this separate metaphysical treatment of God in himself, in his own right, apart from who God is for us, as a kind of “dualism.” For brevity sake, we will focus mostly on Gunton’s argument in his book Act and Being.

Gunton offers a succinct, if biting, glimpse into the Barthian impression of the classical doctrine. It uses “the wrong method” to yield “the wrong content” and all in “the wrong order.”  

The notion that classical theology proper was infected by pagan metaphysics is not original to Gunton. However, there are two steps that he draws out with greater clarity. First, natural theology abstracted from things in this world (motion, causality, degrees of perfection, etc.) to eliminate what God cannot be; second, one concludes such a deity as is opposed to all that is in this world. The upshot is a hard dualism in which God cannot relate to this world. Natural theology begets the via negativa; and the two in turn give us a remote, static, Neoplatonic One. 

It seems to me that one weakness may be exposed in this criticism right away. Granting that such knowledge is negative and, to that extent, “opposed” to that which may be affirmed positively of creatures, there is an equivocation occurring in this use of opposition. Swain offers a helpful corrective in speaking of “‘family resemblances’ between God and his creatures,” such that these form “the ontological basis of the divine names.” Whether one speaks properly of God as wise (and first learned what a wise thing was from their grandfather) or else metaphorically of God as Rock (and by a mountainous rock learns what a relatively unchangeable thing is), in either case, it hardly seems as if these predicates of God are “opposed” in either a metaphysical or moral sense to those effects of God. 

Beneath this equivocation rests what seems to be another presumption. Gunton wrote as if act were not a thing in any sense: that it is contrary to metaphysics. Additionally he seems to endorse the conception of “nature” held by Schleiermacher, that it “implies corporeality and limitedness.” This forms a basic presupposition. It is not that one side is wholly philosophical and the other is not. Rather, he insists, “Greeks appear to stress a theology of divine being, Hebrews of divine action.” Holiness becomes one prime example of what must regard act, rather than essence. In this way Gunton draws a thick line between classical being and action.

Now Gunton does come back to that place that all Barthians do. We are assured at the end of the day that there is a God in himself, but that the whole emphasis must be on how he has revealed himself. So, for example, Gunton rightly says, “the order of being grounds the order of knowing, so that what God does in time is shown to be a function of what he is eternity,” or again, “the human love that Jesus is is at the same time the love of God in action.” Of course the classical view can say the same. Consequently, the Barthians real complaint is in arriving at that theological “ground” from the ways of causation and especially negation. By contrast, “The outcome [of the narrative way] is that historical revelation and eternal being correspond to one another.”

The trouble is that once theology proper is gutted of metaphysical description, there is nothing left of “eternal being” but the mirror of that which is most anthropomorphic in the temporal narrative. If God in himself is known wholly by God as revealed in the economy, then it makes no sense to speak of God as anything but a composite, mutable, time-bound, co-suffering co-learner. If the “left-to-right” drama of finite thoughts and wills are all that is left of “act,” then no world, much less narrative, could have ever been written into being.

The problem may be clarified by making a more fundamental distinction. We might call this the difference between essential act and instantiating act. I realize that such a division will immediately be charged with Platonism, or at least a Realist conception that ought not to be impressed onto our theology as a presupposition. I will grant that the point should be established and not merely assumed; and yet I maintain that such a division will find biblical support. By “essential act” I mean that divine act which is perfect, undivided, and self-sufficient, as we would all grant that God’s must be. By “instantiated act” (at least in this context) I mean any manifestations of God’s actions that we can discern in the biblical narrative. 

The aforementioned John 1:4 and 5:26 give a good sense of this. No matter where one falls on whether 5:26 speaks to eternal generation, all Reformed theologians would at least grant these two senses in which God is in act when it comes to having life in himself. One is at least immanent and the other is at least economical. Theology already has the category of God’s works ad extra. Here I am narrowing that focus to the place where Barthians want us to begin: namely in the narratively discerned actions of God in which God is said to disclose his very being. God has life in himself in the actus purus sense, and the human Christ has been granted life in himself as a function of the pactum salutis such that no one born to the race of Adam can have this life apart from Christ. The economical life (ad extra) is rooted in the theological life (ad intra); and we can make sense of that by abstracting from the text, without any violence to the text. 

Query the Barthians’ method down to this bottom line: When it comes to the order of being (let us leave aside the order of knowing): is God indeed a se? Barth, Torrance, Gunton, and Jenson would all affirm divine aseity as such (though it certainly receives quite the makeover in Jenson). What then? The response will be that this is not where we discover such a God: not in a priori definitions. We cannot discover him behind his actions for us, or independent of the economy of grace, or apart from the incarnate Christ. When the Barthians finally admit what classical theology always affirmed, what is left of the critique (to take Gunton’s version) is that classical theology collapsed the order of knowing into the order of being. To use Luther’s lexicon, classical theology is depicted as giving us nothing but a theology of glory and nowhere a theology of the cross. 

However, even elements of Christ’s humiliation and death are instantiated acts, albeit the preeminent ones in the whole of Scripture. They are not a disturbance to the internal life of God. Gunton recognizes that Moltmann represents the other extreme—that in the suffering of the Son there was even a conflict between Father and Son, or else a return to patripassianism. Gunton’s attempt at a resolution is an admirable conjunction of divine power and wisdom from Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 1. Here the suffering was decreed, eschatologically, to conquer suffering and not merely for God to declare to man, “I feel your pain,” but as a demonstration of God’s saving power. Yet, as to how this is possible in the divine essence to begin with, Gunton offers no resolution at all.

Gunton’s specific critique of the two wills in the Son is an area where pure act could answer. He considers the problems of conceiving “will” as an attribute. Then he spans the problem over to the two wills of Christ, focusing on the account of Gethsemane (Mat. 26:39), and adds: “To avoid the problem of there being two wills in God, two were attributed to Christ.” Now let us leave aside that there is a positive reason for that doctrine, both in the true humanity per se, and in Christ’s covenantal reason for taking that will on: namely to represent us in obedience. Gunton is not satisfied with his one-dimensional account of how the doctrine of the two wills historically emerged. He adds to it the argument that natures cannot have wills, only persons, and that the doctrine of two wills is thus guilty of Nestorianism. Here is that fundamental assumption coming to the fore, that of radical antithesis between essential being and action. 

What is this charge but a straw man in any event? The classical doctrine is not that Christ’s human nature “has” a will apart from his Person, but rather that the Person of the Son assumes to himself the whole human nature, which entails human will. But the suspicion is opened up that the Chalcedonian conception of Christ must favor the Nestorian side, since Christ’s human will cannot genuinely act if it is a distinct nature from the person. Two persons must have been in view, he concludes. We must push back again:

Why could not an eternally pure act encompass both the one divine will (via simplicity) and imply that which is proper to the generation of the Son, and procession of the Spirit, in a way that resolves the tension Gunton sees between being (essential unity) and act (personal activity)? To draw out such a model is subject for Christology; but suffice it to say that I do not think Gunton makes his case. 

The larger problem for Gunton’s discovery of God in the narrative acts is the age-old philosophical problem of unity and diversity. How exactly does one distinguish a divine act from a non-divine act without presupposing some knowledge of being? It may be answered that each subsequent act encountered need only presuppose that knowledge, whether of being or otherwise, gained from prior acts, so that it will finally terminate on some first act, whether Genesis 1:1 or one to which each reader was introduced along the path. But these decisive acts (for Jenson they are Exodus and Resurrection), what difference would it make if it were YHWH who conquered Pharaoh or Christ who conquered death? What if it were Baal or Krishna? How do we know it was not them, under a Hebrew or Greek pseudonym? Whatever answer we give will finally terminate on a metaphysical assessment. 

APPLICATION OF PURE ACT TO THE PERSONAL ATTRIBUTES OF GOD

In this final section I am not attempting any classification of “personal attributes,” but rather continuing to take up the challenge of modern theology in its focus on the narrative relationship between God and his creatures. No doubt the modern interpreter suspects the classical theological mind of seeing these narrative depictions as “merely analogical,” perhaps even allegorical.

Anthropomorphisms are to the classicalist, the Barthian reasons, only the exegetical floatation device in the event of the water landings of God sympathizing or regretting or learning. While for the modern theologian at large, all theology becomes anthropomorphic. 

Utilizing divine impassibility as a case study, I maintain that pure act helps us understand how the impassible God can have emotions. While our excursion into inter-Trinitarian love clarifies how there must be an uninterrupted and undiminished act that we would all agree is chief among feelings in our own experience, the misgiving remains. Over a century of criticism has been leveled against classical theological categories precisely on this ground—i.e. the God of the incommunicable attributes cannot have genuine, personal relationship with human beings. Behind this emphasis of modern theology lurks the assumption that the essence of “personality” is a set of attributes that are frankly defective. 

This is not to say that for the creature succession is a defect. However, the moment one thinks in comparative terms between God and what it would take for him to be “personal” to us, it turns out that he would “be more” only by being less. For example, we are told that God would know more by knowing that “it” is 2:53 PM “right now.” God would sympathize more by being hurt by Susan’s divorce or by Billy’s being laid off work. Without in any way minimizing how God does in fact sympathize with such weaknesses, what these demands amount to is logically equivalent to the propositions that “God waits at 2:53 for 2:54 to come around” and “God remembers at 2:53 when it was 2:52.” Likewise, to reduce God’s feeling to activation only if he hurts in just the same way as Susan or Billy is tantamount to God being divorced and being laid off work. In fact, we are not talking about units of knowledge and feeling at all in these equivocations.

Impassibility is not saying that God has no emotions, but rather that he is not subject to successive emotional states. He loses no emotion, nor does he gain any. God is not a reactive being at all, like a plant that could respond to stimuli, or even a radioactive element that can decay or stabilize.

Nothing can activate any potentiality of passion in God, as this would imply the opposite of actus purus. The historian of the early church fathers, G. L. Prestige, summarized the concept as it was held: “It is clear that impassibility means not that God is inactive or uninterested, not that he surveys existence with Epicurean impassibility from the shelter of a metaphysical isolation, but that his will is determined from within instead of being swayed from without. It safeguards the truth that the impulse alike in providential order and in redemption and sanctification come from the will of God.”

Now what does it mean that God wills what he wills as a Person, toward created persons, and all as an eternal decree that has neither beginning nor sequence within? If there could be a better description of this than what pure act is in a Thomistic mode, I certainly cannot conceive of it. The doctrine is established by that same negation that it is discovered. When the logical impossibility of divine potentiality is perceived, the logical necessity of pure act is admitted. Although it can only help to canvas biblical texts that seem to imply it, no further burden of proof remains—unless, that is, Scripture seemed to push against it. But Scripture does no such thing; and modern theology’s assumption that narrative movement and personal interaction rules it out is just that: an assumption. 

CONCLUDING REMARKS

This paper has aimed to show 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. Thus far, I have not seen any place where those following Barth have seriously interacted with the doctrine of actus purus as the means by which classical theology already had an answer for how God in se could meaningfully cohere with the narrative flow or personal actions that we see in Scripture. The chasm between classical metaphysics and God for us is simply asserted. To be sure, they offer a historical account of how pagan thought intruded, and they follow with all of the things that the metaphysical deity cannot do. But none of their authors that I am aware of have shown how pure act cannot function in this role as I have maintained. 

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