4
It is a well-known psychological fact of utmost practical importance that (1) Artisans / Guardians and (2) Rationals / Idealists are natural complements in marriage. If you intend to marry, then you’ll be well-advised to find out your own temperament and limit your search to your precise match. I’m not kidding: if you value your happiness, it’s crucial to do this.
Now I have suggested that the four causes can be matched up with the four temperaments. If form and matter, connected to (1), are natural complements, signifying act and potency, present in all nature and purely in God and “prime matter,” then the efficient and final causes, connected to (2), must be complements, as well. The question is, what do they mean? The answer is: variety and unity; the technical details and the big picture, so to speak. These are just as metaphysically primal as act and potency. An illustration is the means vs. ends. The end might be one in three: metaphysical, moral, and physical perfection, and the latter in particular, called happiness. So, the end is one, but the means to it are incredibly varied. God is pure unity, being simple and one. Prime matter, abstractly, is pure variety, making up a bewildering array of elementary particles, forces, elements, molecules, etc.
Now God contains within Himself the variety, virtually. As I write here, “Aquinas believes that God, too, is a unity in variety. It’s just that he holds that God’s variety is such that He is infinite and incomprehensible by any finite creature; and that His unity is such that He is a simple being. God is thus the limit of both categories (unity and variety).” And that coheres well with the fact that God is the source of matter, despite being pure act. He knows all possibilities and potentialities.
July 30th, 2008 at 10:26 am
God is a simple unity. There is no variety in God in any proper sense of the word. He is utterly simple, pure act. It is only through metaphor, an improper analogy of attribution, that one could speak of variety in him.
If he is infinite, he cannot be a limit. An actual infinity cannot limit something, only a potential infinity can.
“Because we cannot know what God is, but rather what He is not, we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how He is not.” Ia,3.
July 30th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
A limit can be infinity. If y = 1/x, then lim y as x → 0 is ∞.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:33 pm
Heh, was the book cover for me?
and yes, a limit can be infinity. Just not an actual infinity.
July 30th, 2008 at 8:44 pm
Phil, the cover’s for you and everybody. This is a life-changing book. See also Keirsey’s website.
Now if there is no variety in God, what do the blessed see in Him? Aquinas calls God in one place “infinite form.” So, it takes an infinite amount of information to describe God. Hence the “variety.”
You are right, by “limit” I mean “limiting case,” actual infinity.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:14 pm
Thanks for the reference.
whatever receives, receives according the the mode of the receiver - the blessed see in Him the perfections that they have cultivated in their earthly life. But such a prism is from the beatus, not from God, who is one and utterly simple.
No creature could measure God, so even an infinite amount of knowledge, if human, could not describe God. There is no description of him that does not imply a greater negation of that description. To say he is one is to say he has no parts, and to say he is simple is to say there is no multiplicity in him. Frankly, this is rather baffling to me, that God is one but not in a way that implies number. There’s a reason the Divine Comedy fails so miserably at its climax, since the poet’s task is to take what is less clear and explain it by what is more clear to us.
I don’t know what “limiting case” means, so I’ll just go with you on that one.
July 31st, 2008 at 4:44 pm
> the blessed see in Him the perfections that they have cultivated in their earthly life
Is that so? Maybe that’s why they say that ecstasy means “standing outside yourself”… you’ll see yourself perfectly, every good and every privation. But you must also see the First Cause and comprehend God’s power as extending to all things human and below. That is, you will know the relevant universals, both abstracted from particulars and those that cause multiple effects.
July 31st, 2008 at 7:15 pm
Eye has not seen and all that.
May we all cross safely to that final shore.