Book I, Chapter 4

Chapter 4. That whenever any creature moves, God necessarily co-moves; it has a Corollary of four parts. 1

With these things known beforehand, it cannot be doubted that when any creature moves, God necessarily co-moves. For to exist is less than to move: some things exist that do not move and that cannot move, but whatever moves exists. And by the second of this 2, no creature can exist through itself, so neither is it enough for it to move through itself without God. Likewise, by the third of this, no creature can through itself produce any motion, nor, by the second, conserve what has been produced; God is therefore required as a necessary co-worker.

Moreover, all the arguments, or nearly all, and very many Authorities that have been adduced for the divine conservation and making of things can also be adduced for his co-moving, with the terms changed as is fitting. Further, as it is in the lesser world, so it seems to be in the greater world. But in the lesser world, that is, in a man or an animal, every motion of it as such arises from its formal and essential principle, namely the Soul, as is clear from On the Soul 2, 37. Therefore every motion in the greater World will arise from its corresponding principle, namely God himself. And this seems to be Aristotle's answer in On the World, B1 11, as is clear in that long Authority written out in the third of this; hence he holds this opinion also, and below, in chapter 13, he shows the same opinion by a similar argument.

For he says: "He himself, unmoved, moves all things and carries them round wherever he wills, in diverse ideas and natures, just as the law of a city, I say, being unmoved, orders in the souls of those who use it the soul that accords with civic order." And he shows this as if by induction, through the individual works of the city; and concluding he says: "So, then, we must judge also of the greater city, I mean the World: for God is for us a law inclining equally." 3 Furthermore, there is ‖C1 that opinion set out above, which posits God as the soul of the great world; and that of Avicenna, Metaphysics 9, 1, who says, "The Heaven is an Animal obeying God." Averroes also, on Metaphysics 12, Comment 39, says that it has been shown by reason that there is some one thing, eternal and exceedingly noble, and it is that which moves everything; this, therefore, is God.

Likewise, if a creature could through itself move in one species of motion, it could in every species; so it could through itself alter, generate, and make many new things, which the immediately preceding chapter does not permit. Likewise, everything that has a form moves only through it, as all Philosophy cries out; but as the second of this shows, God is the form of every form, and is the substantial act by which every form is what it is, which is clear from the same place; he is therefore the substantial form of every form. By this argument it is proved in On the Soul 2 that the soul is the form of the animate thing. Therefore no form moves except through God; therefore neither can anything formed move except through him.

Likewise, to the same point: Every formed thing that moves moves through the form most essential and principal to it, insofar as it is such a formed thing; but God is the form most essential and principal of any formed thing whatever. For when God and a creature are the causes of one effect in the same genus of cause, who would attribute to God what is the more imperfect and the lesser? Nor indeed do the things premised in the second of this allow it. Likewise Augustine, City of God 22, 20, cites from Cicero such a definition of God: "God is a certain mind, free and unbound, set apart from every mortal concretion, perceiving and moving all things, and itself endowed with an everlasting nod" 4; and this he finds, as he says, in the books of the great Philosophers. Likewise, God is the first cause in the genus of moving causes, as he is of formal and final causes, as is shown in Physics 8 and Metaphysics 12 and by many Philosophers in many places; and it can be had from the second Supposition, that no later cause moves except in the power of a prior cause, as is clear from the first Proposition of the Book of Causes with its Commentary cited above, and because the first in any genus is the cause of whatever later thing there is in that genus, as the things premised in the second of this testify. God therefore necessarily co-moves with every mover. Moreover, otherwise there could not ‖E1 be taken any route from lower movers to prove some first mover, against Aristotle (Physics 7 and 8, Metaphysics 12), Alexander, Averroes, Avicenna, and nearly all the other Philosophers, with whom the Theological authors also agree on this point. Likewise, an instrument is not moved skilfully except by the craftsman; but every later mover is an instrument of the first mover; otherwise it would not be naturally later than it, but prior, or even coeval, or entirely disparate outside every order.

Hence Boethius says, Consolation of Philosophy 4, prose 6: A1 "The whole generation of things, ‖A2 and the entire progress of changeable natures, and whatever else is moved in any way, takes its causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine mind. For just as a craftsman, perceiving in his mind the form of the thing to be made, sets the effect of the work in motion, and what he has foreseen simply and in a single present he leads through temporal orders, so God by providence disposes what is to be done singularly and stably, but by fate administers these very things which he has disposed, manifoldly and in time." Averroes also bears witness to this on On Sleep and Waking, A3 saying that the causes of future things are not determinate in being among us, but with the intellective nature, from which the sensible nature receives whatever it receives and by which it is moved, as instruments are moved by the form of the craft; and so no individual comes to be essentially by nature except through a foregoing knowledge, since the instrument of a craftsman, as Aristotle says, is not moved except according to the craftsman. Behold: Averroes the Commentator holds universally to this, and cites Aristotle for the same.

He also says on Metaphysics 12, comment 44: that the first mover and the lower movers are much like crafts 5 which serve one another and help one another toward one product; and they are such that some of them rule over others, and all are led back to one craft and are perfected by one another, and all are led back to receive all their principles from the universal craft that contains them; and therefore the science proper to the first God is like First Philosophy, and the science proper to the principles that are under him is like the particular sciences that are under First Philosophy, B1 as Nicomachus the Peripatetic said in his First Philosophy. Hermes also plainly attests this opinion in On the Eternal Word 14, as the second of this set out earlier. Hence also Augustine, On the Trinity 6, last chapter: "The Son is a certain art of the omnipotent and wise God, full of all the living, unchangeable rationales, and all of them one in it, just as it is itself one from the One, with whom it is one; there God, who made through it, knows all things. For he himself is the artisan of all things" (Wisdom 7). 6 It is confirmed by a similar case.

For by the Philosopher, On the Soul 2, where cited before: "All physical bodies are instruments of the soul"; and since God incomparably exceeds any soul, all things are his instruments. Certain things premised in the preceding chapter also seem expressly to attest God's craftsmanship. Hence the divine Isaiah, chapters 29 and 45, calls God potter, maker, and moulder; C1 but man he calls clay, work, figment, and potsherd; and the Apostle, following him in Romans 9, calls them by the same names. The Lord also, through Isaiah 10, likens Sennacherib, king of Assyria, to the rod and staff of fury, and to the axe in which God cuts, and to the saw drawn by God, and to the rod which God lifts. On this the Gloss says: "As these inanimate things are only instruments, doing nothing through themselves but through him who moves them, so neither did Sennacherib work through himself, but in God's power." The same, namely about the craftsman and the instruments, is attested also by Thomas Aquinas, On Faith, Hope, and Charity 133, as the second of this cites. C2 Further, Augustine in book 8 of On Genesis Literally shows at length that God moves every creature, spiritual and corporeal, voluntary and of any other kind, in all its motions; and there also, in chapter 29, having distinguished the work of divine providence into two parts, namely creation and administration, by which he provides for the whole universe and for single creatures, he says: "The Creator Spirit moves himself without time and place, moves a created spirit through time without place, and moves a body through time and place." In agreement with him Dionysius also, On the Divine Names 4, speaking of the good and best which is praised in God, says: "This one, the best and good, is uniquely the cause of all the many goods D1 and best things; and from it come all the essential subsistences of existing things, unities, distinctions, immutabilities, alterities, likenesses, unlikenesses, associations of contraries, distinctions of things united, providences of the higher, alternations of the equiform, conversions of all lower things, preservative of themselves, and immutable dwellings and placements; and again, for all things in all things, the associations proper to each, the compactings, the unconfused friendships, the harmonies of the whole, and the universal, indissoluble concretions, the containments of existing things,

the unfailing receptions of things to be made, all states and motions, some of intellectual beings, some of souls, some of bodies. For there is for all a state and a motion above every motion and every state, setting each thing in its own principle, and moving it into its own motion." Where, having next shown how Angels and souls are moved circularly, directly, and obliquely, he adds: "Of these, therefore, and of sensible things in the universe, of the three motions, and far more fundamentally of each of the abodes, stations, and placements, he is the cause, and the container, and the end, the good and best, and above every state and motion. Therefore every state and motion is from himself, and through himself, and into him, and for his sake. For from him and for his sake are both the essence and the life of every mind and soul, and all natures, all conjunctions, consummations, limits, orders, all essence, all power, all operation, all habit, all sense, all reason, all intellect, all illumination, all knowledge, all summit, and simply every being 7; it is from the good and best, and is converted into the good and best; and all things whatsoever that are and come to be, are and come to be through the good and best, and toward all these, namely, and by him they are moved and contained," etc., as recited more fully in the second of this.

1 The holy Hierotheus, moreover, in his love hymns, as Dionysius recalls where cited before, speaks thus: "There is a certain single, simple power, moving itself toward a certain unity, a tempering 8 *1·2 from the best down to the last of existing things, and from that last again, in turn, through all things up to the best; and from itself, and through itself, and to itself, revolving itself, and revolved into itself always in the same way." Does not the Wise Man also teach the same, saying: "Wisdom is more mobile than all mobile things; it reaches everywhere, and being one, it can do all things, and remaining in itself it renews all things"; "it reaches therefore from end to end mightily, and disposes all things sweetly." Does not Truth himself also say: "My Father works even until now, and I work"; and the Apostle of truth says: "In him we live, and are moved, and are."

1 First, that nothing can move anything without God co-moving the same per se and properly. 2 Second, that nothing can move anything without God immediately moving the same. 3 Third, that nothing can move anything without God moving the same more immediately than any other mover whatever. 4 Fourth, that no proposition attributing any created thing to any second cause is immediate simply.

Hence also, with sound eyes, I repeat it as manifest that nothing can move anything without God co-moving the same per se and properly, and without God immediately moving the same, indeed more immediately than any other mover whatever; immediately, I say, and more immediately, as the corollaries of the second and third set out. And from this natural corollary there manifestly follows another, a logical corollary: that no proposition attributing any caused thing to any second cause is immediate simply. That natural corollary is evident enough from what has been premised in this chapter, with the corollaries of the third and the second joined to it along with their proofs; once this is safely supposed, the logical corollary is easily demonstrated. For no proposition that has a cause naturally mediating between its extremes (that is, a cause that is naturally the middle of the inherence of the extremes) is immediate simply, as the first book of the Posterior Analytics shows; but every such proposition is of this sort, as the nearest natural corollary, together with the other earlier corollaries, clearly proves. But if anyone should reply by quibbling that God moves all moved things, yet not properly, immediately, and through himself, but only through another mediating, say the Heaven, either because he made the mover and the thing moved, or because he conserves them, or because he permits, or does not hinder, or defends them from hinderers,

he will easily be refuted by what has been premised, just as the second of this and the third refuted similar [objectors]. ‖D1 And if anyone objects against the chapter that then God would bark, eat husks, lie, steal, with the other absurdities that are better passed over in silence than spoken, and against the Corollary that the Philosopher affirms in Logic as in Philosophy that many propositions of this kind are immediate, it must be said that the first objection does not go through, because those words do not signify such actions absolutely, that is, only according to what they essentially are or come to be, but with a certain relation to the creature, in so far as they flow and emanate from God. For the second it must be said that the Philosopher in such matters speaks as a natural philosopher, namely of the immediacy of a second cause, that is, of a natural cause; and this is immediacy only in a certain respect, since it is only in the genus of created things; it is not, however, immediacy simply, which simply deprives every cause of a middle.