Book I, Chapter 1, corollary: part 25

Against those who do not distinguish, but concede simply that God is of infinite virtue and infinite power, even intensively. 25

Let them distinguish and separate the pure from the base, and the true sense from the false, who say that God is of infinite virtue and infinite power. As to infinity according to duration alone, or according to extension, or according to the other improper modes which the Philosopher touches on in Physics 3 1, no one seems to wish such a statement to be understood in these ways. It is to be understood only according to intension; and even according to infinity of this kind it can have a twofold sense.

One sense is the proper one: that God is properly intense, and his virtue and power infinitely so, as if some light, once remitted, were intensified until it were infinitely intense; or that it were infinitely intense from the beginning, just as heat and other natural qualities are intense under definite degrees. But in this way God is not properly infinite intensively, nor is any virtue of his. For whatever is properly intense could without contradiction be remitted. God and his virtue, then, could be remitted and be more imperfect than he now is; and this potentiality, together with its actualization 2, the fourth part and the first Supposition forbid.

Again, if God were properly intense, it would be possible without contradiction for there to be some supposit 3 of the same species or nature that was more remiss. And since "God" is an essential name, because otherwise God could fail to be God, that more remiss supposit, once posited, would be God. Hence, according to the fourth part, it would also be supremely perfect, and therefore supremely intense. Moreover, it was shown earlier that it is not possible for there to be many unequal gods of the same species or nature. Why also could not the more remiss God be intensified up to the highest, to equality with the more intense, since they are of the same nature? And so there could be many equal gods, of the same species, differing in number alone. God would also be mutable, which was rejected above.

The same could be demonstrated in many other ways, but I think these should suffice for any lover of truth. God, then, is not properly intense, nor remiss, nor intensible, nor remissible, but is of a nature most indivisible, most immutable, most stable, and most simple. Yet he is truly, though in a certain sense improperly, of infinite virtue, infinite strength, and infinite power intensively. This can be understood in three ways. First, with respect to other active powers, namely equivalently and also surpassingly. For however great an action or effect this active power can produce (say heat, or double or quadruple of it, and so on), God can by his own power, without the help of anyone, produce a greater one besides. Indeed, even if there could be heat infinite intensively and able to act to that degree, God likewise could. Second, as to the species of action. For God by his own power can make something from nothing, and create it, which no other power, however great, can do.

Third, as to the measure of extrinsic action or effect. Every effect which another cause produces in some time, God could produce in a smaller time, as small as you like, indeed even in an instant. God can also proceed to some extrinsic operation or effect 4, even one twice as great, four times as great, and so on as far as you like without end. There is therefore no maximum which he is able to do, nor minimum which he is unable to do; hence he can truly be said to be of infinite power. For according to the Philosopher, On the Heavens and the World 1, 116 5, and Averroes in the Commentary, active power is defined and bounded by the maximum to which it can reach, or, according to those who look perhaps more subtly, by the minimum to which it cannot.