Book I, Chapter 8

Chapter Viii

That God has willing and love, in common and in particular, toward all things whatsoever.

It now remains, in due sequence, to show that God has willing and love, in common and in particular, toward all things whatsoever. For according to what has gone before, God preserves, makes and moves all things, and not without a knowledge and a wisdom that direct them, as the sixth chapter of this book shows. But these things preserve, make and move nothing without will. For his knowledge, taken alone, is of impossible things just as it is of possible ones; of possible things that will never come to be just as of things that are to be made; of past things just as of future ones; of future things in the distant future just as in the near; and of all future things just as of present ones, which are now actually being made, or, already made, are being preserved. If, therefore, knowledge alone of itself made or preserved anything, it would always and at once make all the things mentioned above. Again, the divine knowledge of itself appears indifferent to making or not making; indeed, by itself alone it does not appear to be productive at all. It therefore can bring about nothing unless it is limited by something determining it; and this can be posited only as an actual divine willing. Again, it seems to be so in God's production of things A1 as in the production of progressive motion by an animal. In this, knowledge alone does not suffice, but appetite is required along with it, as Aristotle proves in On the Soul 3, where he inquires into the principle of this motion. He proves, first, that it is not the vegetative power; second, that it is not the sensitive power; third, that it is not reason, nor the speculative intellect, nor the practical; fourth, that appetite itself is not the master of this motion; fifth, that these two, namely imagination and appetite, or intellect and will, move the animal progressively. These points are set out more explicitly by Averroes there, in comment A2 44 and following; and the same is plainly proved in On the Motion of Animals.1

Again, according to the Philosopher, Ethics 9, 7,2 every craftsman loves his work, and everyone who does good loves the one who receives the good, namely the one to whom he does good, and loves him more than he is loved in return. All things are the works of God, the supreme Craftsman, as the preceding chapters have taught, and his benefits are distributed most generously. Again, otherwise God would neither preserve nor act freely, since no action is free that does not proceed from a free will; and so a peasant or a slave would be freer than God. Otherwise, too, God would have no will, against the eighth part of the first Corollary of this book, or he could not use his own will, along with infinitely many other absurdities. Moreover, a free and voluntary manner of working outwardly is better and nobler than any other. Hence a rational power, which works in this way, is held to be nobler than an irrational one, which works otherwise. This manner of working outwardly, therefore, whatever things are in question, must be attributed to God, as the third part of the first Corollary of this book testifies. This view is also clearly attested by certain authorities set out beforehand in the second chapter of this book.3 B1 Algazel, in Metaphysics 3, sentence 7, says that the First is willing,

and that all things flow from him and are pleasing to him,4 and that he hates none of them. That ancient Empedocles was looking at this from afar. C1 For, as Aristotle recounts in Metaphysics 3, 15,5 he posited two general principles of things, namely Love and Hatred; but in God he posited love toward all things, without hatred of anything. C2 The Wise Man agrees with this in Wisdom 11, addressing the Lord in this way: C3 "You love all things that are, and you hated nothing of those you made. For how could anything remain unless you had willed it, or be preserved, if it had not been called by you?"