Aquinas’s Fourth Way of Demonstrating God’s Existence: From Virtual Quantum Gradations of Perfection (Inequality in Beauty) of Forms Existing within a Real Genus

Abstract

The chief aim of this article is to show that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fourth Way of demonstrating God’s existence can only be made precisely intelligible by comprehending it as a real, generic whole in light of its specific organizational principles. Considered as a real, generic whole, this argument is one from effect to cause (from a real order of more or less perfectly existing generic, specific, and individual beings [habens esse] more or less perfectly possessing generic, specific, and individual ways of being within qualitatively different, hierarchical, orders of existence to a first cause of this order of perfections). In addition, this article maintains that, to comprehend this complicated argument, readers mush be familiar with philosophical principles that St. Thomas repeatedly uses throughout his major works, but with which most of his contemporary students tend to be unfamiliar. Consequently, a secondary aim of this paper is to introduce readers unfamiliar with them to some of these principle so that they may be able better to comprehend what St. Thomas is saying in this demonstration and in other teachings of his as well.

Keywords

• Thomas Aquinas
• fourth way
• God
• existence
• genus
• species
• individual
• principle
• analogous predication
• unity
• number
• virtual quantity
• privation
• perfection
• resistance
• receptivity
• opposition
• contrariety