In this chapter, White considers the nature of God in itself, the immanent life and operations of God.
Since God is spirit (John 4:24), His life is one of immaterial knowledge and love. Accordingly, we will need to consider the inner life of God analogically by comparison with the spiritual life and operations of creatures. Moreover, as intellect precedes will in human understanding (because we can love only what we first come to know), we will first consider God’s knowledge, and then God’s love.
Divine Knowledge
In God, the eternal life of knowledge must be an immanent act, and, moreover, must be itself identical with the pure actuality of God. Therefore, God is His intellect. God is His act of knowledge or contemplation. He is the immaterial act of knowledge in all that he is—perfect knowledge that can know no diminishment or imperfection (pure act). 326
Q. What is the object of God’s divine knowledge?
- Himself. He is the unique primary object of His knowledge and understanding.
- God knows directly the plenitude of His own being, and knows all other things “in Himself ” in a comprehensive way, not because He learns about them gradually by studying them, but insofar as He is the cause of their very existence.
- God knows himself and, in knowing himself, knows all things that he creates.
Q. What is the “medium” through which He knows?
- His own divine essence.
- God’s own essence provides the formal medium by which he knows, and God knows all things (including all created, finite, contingent, and temporal things) through the eternal intuition of his own essence (through the medium of his own self-knowledge).
- God’s knowledge is not reactive to but causative of what he knows. God causes us to be through the knowledge he has of himself.
Does God know my future?
- Yes, God knows all future contingent realities insofar as He is their cause.
- God does NOT foresees future entities, in the sense that He is learning from them what will or might eventually come to be. For what will come to be does not currently exist.
- Rather, God knows the future of the creation from all eternity because he will create the future. He foresees all that will come to exist, for, from all eternity, he is the cause of its existence. In other words, God knows future contingents not by any kind of foreknowledge anthropomorphically conceived (as if God were estimating future likelihoods by first observing his creatures), but through the medium of his own eternal knowledge, to which the future (which does not yet exist) is utterly transparent.
- It is in virtue of the perfection of his eternal knowledge that we can trust God always and everywhere to save us effectively in Christ. Only he who perfectly knows us, as only the Creator does, can also perfectly save us. 336
Divine Will
Just as God is his own intellect, so also he is his own will.
- What we term analogically the intellect and will of God, then, refer to a mystery that is one in the eternal life of the divine nature.
- In human beings the faculties of intellect and will are truly distinct, while in God’s essence they denote a unique plenitude of uncreated wisdom and love that produces effects similar to both our intellects and our wills.
And as the divine intellect has God’s very substance as its object and act, so too does the divine will. That is to say, God wills and loves himself as his own good, and God is his own act of willing and loving himself. For this reason, God is subsistent love. He is a pure actuality of love, and so also a pure actuality of spiritual joy or beatitude. 337
The basic argument here can be stated as follows:
- Every being tends teleologically toward perfection.
- However, intellectual realities tend toward perfection by means of the rational appetite, that is, the elicited desire for the good perceived by the intellectual agent.
- Therefore, in God, whose life is purely intellectual, there is the elicited appetite for the good, which we call the will.
God’s love is most selfless for 2 reasons.
- First, the fact that God’s love of his own goodness is identical with his very being indicates that God’s goodness and love are infinitely perfect and purely actual, independent of creatures… His activity of creation is sheer giving all the way down.
- His love is also productive of being, and is, as such, the expression of a pure desire to give of one’s self: “the love of God infuses and creates goodness.” Here we see a summit of Aquinas’s biblical thinking: God is love, and love is the ground of the world. The goodness of the cosmos stems from the ever-radiant uncreated love of God. 339
Creation exists, then, in virtue of a kind of ordered playfulness on the part of God. He is younger and more alive than all things, just as he is more ancient and perfectly wise, so that the intelligible order, goodness, and beauty of creation are an expression of his eternally playful wisdom and love. 340
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The Trinity is eternal and is one in knowledge and in love. As we have noted, Aquinas follows Boethius in understanding eternity not only as perennial being, but as the plenary possession of perfect life. God is life, and his life is eternal. It consists in a transcendent and incomprehensible plenitude of knowledge and love. God knows himself and, in knowing himself, knows all things that he creates. God loves himself in his own infinite goodness and, in doing so, freely communicates being to all creatures, as a finite (but for us immeasurable) expression outside himself of his own goodness. Understood in this way, there can be no competition or confusion between the eternal life of the Trinity, on the one hand, and the historical and ontological unfolding of the economy on the other. God’s eternity is neither external to our temporal creation nor identical with it. We can say, rather, in a true sense, that creation unfolds within the eternity of God, and God’s eternal Triune life is present within all of history. God’s life of knowledge and love is shared by all three persons in God. They each know and love all of creation, all that has been, all that is, and all that will come to be and exist in time. They know and love created persons in particular, each of whom is created in the image of the Trinity and is intended for union with God by grace and divine inhabitation by the persons of God. Their eternal knowledge and love thus encompass and accompany the unfolding history of human persons, in their collectivity and individuality. The trinity is the uncreated communion of persons that eternally precedes the created communion of persons that is the Church. At the same time, the Trinitarian persons are not constituted or created by their knowledge and love of creation, nor is their communion in any way dependent upon the life of the Church, the decisions of created persons, or the unfolding features of creation, with its complex and multilayered cosmic history. 675
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