In 2015, after two years of teaching high school theology, I quit my job. I didn't have any plans for what would come next, but for various reasons I knew I didn’t want to keep teaching. I was living with my parents at the time and had a little money saved, so I decided to spend some time reading and writing, in the hope that somehow through that process I would figure out what I wanted to do with my life.
My main writing project at that point was an article-by-article commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. I'd started working on it at the end of my masters program, hoping to eventually produce a publishable commentary in imitation of classics by authors like John Poinsot and Domingo Bañez. During the initial burst of work, I had written commentaries on the first few dozen articles. Now that I had time to dedicate myself to the project, I decided to start over and do a more thorough job, providing explanations of obscure passages that would be intelligible to modern readers, passing nothing over. I wanted to make sure I presented everything as thoroughly as possible, in a way that would make sense to people today.
Because of this goal, I didn't let myself move on from any particular section of the text until I felt like I'd managed to really understand and explain the (presumably sound) reasoning behind it. This meant providing more elaborate and explicit reconstructions of Thomas's arguments, defining terms for him, and expanding upon the frequently terse expressions supplied in the text, whenever they felt insufficiently clear.
After a few weeks of work I had written well over a hundred pages, and was working on the most famous article of the Summa—"Whether God exists?" This article contains Thomas's "Five Ways", five arguments for proving the existence of God. For each of the arguments I provided an extensive reconstruction, clarifying both what it was proving (what sort of God?) as well as explanations of the underlying metaphysical reasoning.
As Aquinas proceeds through the arguments, each one ends up with a slightly richer characterization of God than the last. The First Way seeks to prove that, in some sense, there must be something which is a reason for change in the universe without itself undergoing change. The second adds to this specifically the idea of cause and effect, naming “God” whatever is the ground spring of all causation. The Third Way focuses on the interplay of possibility and necessity, making God the one absolutely necessary thing. Each of the first three took some time, but I found ways of reconstructing what seemed to me to be valid arguments that proved something, albeit not a ton. But when I got to the Fourth Way, I got stuck.
The Fourth Way
The Fourth Way goes like this:
The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But "more" and "less" are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.
There are a bunch of issues with this argument right off the bat. First, there are the two key premises:
“more and less are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum”
“the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus”
These premises are obviously false, as can be readily seen by considering the example Aquinas uses in the argument itself: fire. First, there is simply no such thing as a “maximum heat”, and it certainly isn’t fire. Second, we do not name things based on reference to a maximum. If I say someone is “tall” or “short” this predication isn’t made possible by reference to the tallest or shortest thing. Furthermore, the tallness or shortness of any particular thing is certainly not caused by whatever the tallest or shortest thing in existence is. The notion is absurd, and the argument fails utterly.
Given this absurdity, I was left with two options. First, I could accept that the argument was invalid, attempt to get at whatever the core intuition was, and move on. This option was unappealing because I knew how much of Aquinas’s subsequent reasoning about God’s nature implicitly depends on the characterization made in this argument. If I had to skip the fourth way, if part of the rationally knowable nature of God didn’t include his supreme goodness, then much of the remainder of what the Catholic Church considers “natural theology”1 was actually just revealed theology dressed up in a philosophical costume. This was unacceptable to me. The argument ought to work, or at least something like it ought to work, to bridge the gap between proving the existence of a potentially inert, impersonal principle of causation and proving the existence of an intelligent and provident God.
The second option was to dig in and try and make the Fourth Way work. So I tried. For the next couple of weeks I kept coming back to the argument over and over again. I dug up old latin commentaries on the Summa, returned to my course notes from graduate school, and tried to find someone who had given a thorough and compelling reconstruction of the fourth way. When I couldn’t find anyone who had made it work, I tried my best to sort it out myself. I wrote dozens of pages of exposition on the argument, attempting to reason to the idea that things have natural gradations of goodness or that, in some sense, the “maximum” of any genus is the cause of everything in that genus.
In the end, I couldn’t find a way to make it work. After a couple months of frustration, I ended up setting the project aside and moved on to other things. I returned to the topic a few times in later years, but never managed to sort it out. As time went on, I began to see just how deep the difficulties with the Fourth Way go.
Analogy and Participation
Christian philosophers have often struggled to explain how it is even possible to call God “good”. Even aside from the problem of evil, there’s a more basic metaphysical problem related to the meaning of the word “good” itself. In Catholic theology, God is utterly transcendent. Every characterization of the divine essence is taken to be metaphorical or analogical. It’s a truism in Catholic theology that God is always more unlike our concept of him than he is like it. So when you say “God is good”, what do you really mean? Good like a ripe tomato? Good like a loyal friend? Any concept of “goodness” we might attempt to apply to God would ultimately be derived from the contents of our lived experience. And since we can, by definition, have no direct experience of God’s essence (being immutable, infinite, invisible, eternal, etc.), none of our notions really fit.
This problem, sometimes referred to as the problem of “analogy”, is one of the core metaphysical conundrums for Catholic theology. Over the centuries various attempts to solve it have been made. The most common approach, which is more or less Aquinas’s, is to justify the use of language describing God by way of a theory of formal “participation”. This is to say that everything that exists exists by way of some real likeness to the thing that caused it. Since God is ultimately the cause of everything, everything bears within itself some likeness to the divine essence. This means that we can refer the concepts we derive from things “backwards” to God, by way of analogy. So, if God is the cause of justice in the universe, we can call God “just”. If God is the author of the beauty we find in things, we can call God “beautiful”. If God manifests mercy in our experience of the world, we can call him “merciful”, and so on.
The theory of formal participation rests on a kind of tacit Platonism, which one can even detect in the text of the Fourth Way itself. In order for formal participation to make sense, the interaction of cause and effect must involve a kind of transfer of “form” to the thing receiving the effect, almost like a stamp leaves its mark on anything it is pressed into. The way something receives this form may vary depending on its receptivity and the nature of the form being communicated, but in every case the action of a cause upon another thing must result in the recipient of the change becoming somehow “like” the thing changing it.
This is a funny way to think about causal interactions. If one squints heavily, it can sort of, almost, work. The problem lies in the kind of squinting one has to do to make it hold true. Think about something quite mundane: a fender bender. One car slams on its brakes unexpectedly, and another rear ends it. There’s a sudden stop, some paint scraping, and a big dent left behind on one of the vehicles. Where in this do we see an agent cause imparting its “form” to something receiving an effect?
Well, a good Thomist would happily set about finding ways to translate the concepts to fit the example. Maybe the form here isn’t a specific nature so much as it is the momentum of the moving car, and the way the moving car communicates its “form” is precisely by leaving a dent in the other car—a dent which is sort of shaped like the car that dented it?
To the extent that the form is not communicated, the Thomist will gleefully raise a finger and recite: quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis recipitur. “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” In other words, if a form wasn’t communicated in some decisive or clear way, maybe this is because the thing receiving the form wasn’t primed to receive it. This principle more or less absolves the Thomist of doing any further work to justify the application of the theory to this particular example. Insofar as it fits, the theory is true; insofar as it doesn’t fit, well, the theory still applies because “quidquid recipitur…” etc.
Like so many other tidy philosophical theories offered by Catholicism, this one “works”, but only by means of a massive explanatory loophole that allows proponents to wave away the innumerable ways the theory doesn’t fit or doesn’t explain observed realities. And, let’s be honest, Catholic philosophers don’t analyze the world this way in practice—when push comes to shove, they’re always going to set aside Thomistic metaphysics and resort to the analyses of modern science, without even a second thought.
God is Good
But the fun doesn’t end there. Even if we accept the theory of formal participation and say that somehow our concept of “goodness” maps onto God, the problem is that the specific meaning of God’s “goodness” ends up being pretty much inscrutable.
Catholics don’t grasp this in practice because most descriptions of God in scripture or the liturgy or devotional materials play a consistent game of bait and switch. Most of the time, God is described as if he were an immanent being, with emotions, struggles, passions and preferences. He is “enthroned on high”, like a pagan sky-god. He has reactions to things, he sees things, he says things. When one pushes on any of this descriptive language about God, it’s acknowledged that it’s all metaphorical, and that really we can only speak of God by way of analogy. So, when someone says “God loves you”, technically (at least, according to Catholicism), what they mean is something like this:
Everything God wills is good.
Everything that exists is willed by God.
Since you exist, God wills you to exist.
Everything that exists is in some sense good.
Therefore God can be said to will your good.
To love is to will the good of another.
Therefore God can be said to love you.
This sort of reasoning allows Catholics to say with a straight face that God condemns some people to eternal torture in hell, and that this is an act of love. It is an extremely bloodless concept of love, and you can see how the use of analogical reasoning to “elevate” ordinary concepts into applicability in this transcendental domain eviscerates their ordinary meaning. Everything God does is an act of love. Everything that happens (disasters, suicides, torture, neglect, etc.) is a manifestation of God’s goodness and love.
But things get even wilder from there. Remember, the doctrine of analogy by formal participation is based on the idea that that what causes a specific attribute in other things must have that attribute to a greater extent itself. Since God is the universal cause, he must be not just good, but the highest and most universal good.
This means that any inclination you might have to call into question the relative goodness of God based on suffering or some experienced evil is incorrect. God cannot be deficient. And this means that if you see something apparently good, which God has taught (through the Catholic Church) to be evil, then it must indeed be evil. Your perception of goodness is less trustworthy than the fundamental metaphysical reality that God is good, and true, and just.
This kind of thinking can lead to a lot of really twisted conclusions. For example, when I was a high school teacher I reread parts of the Old Testament and puzzled over some of the atrocities that are decreed by God. How could the massacring of women and children be “good”? But it must have been good, since God commanded it. So there must have been some justification for it.
Or, to take a bigger example, consider the question of religious freedom and freedom of conscience. If God is truly the highest good, then it follows that all of creation, human society included, owes him due worship. This means that a truly just society would not only guide people toward the worship of the true God, but punish anyone who deviated from right morals or the true religion. The right to free speech or free exercise of religion is nothing compared to the supreme rights of God, lord and master of the universe. And just as God’s love is sometimes manifested through natural disasters, plagues, massacres, and so on, it would make sense that a just government, in service to divine law, would sometimes manifest its love for people by imprisoning or executing them for crimes against the orthodox catholic faith.
This sort of thinking used to be entirely at home in Catholicism. Fortunately it has fallen out of fashion as the Church’s political influence has declined and modern secular liberalism has displaced Catholicism from its old place in the political order.
Summary
The core intellectual trick I’m honing in on here is subtle, but worth spelling out again before I close.
We start with a readily available, generic, but ambiguous concept: goodness. We attribute goodness to God in a bunch of different ways that sound nice and agreeable. God is like a good shepherd, like a good father, like a good husband, a good king. God is good like the sun shining down on all of us. Good like a just judge. Et cetera. All of these affirmations borrow the meaning and nature of goodness from specific good things in our experience.
Next, we appeal to God’s place as creator, and conclude (because of formal participation) that the goodness of all the things we used as metaphors for God’s goodness is actually derivative. Their goodness is actually imperfect and secondary compared to God’s. Only God is truly and perfectly good.
Now we have displaced the primary referent of “goodness”. It used to be a shepherd, a judge, a father—now these things are considered imitations or likenesses of the superior goodness found in God. If there is a question about whether something from our experience is good, or whether God is good, God has to win out. After all, what we know from experience is only good by virtue of God’s prior and superior goodness.
Finally, we add in the question of God’s will, divine law, commandments, etc. All the particulars of the Catholic religious tradition, its moral and spiritual precepts, etc. Since the Church speaks authoritatively on matters of faith and morals, the Church speaks authoritatively about the nature of God, his will for us, and consequently what is truly good and bad. If the Church (or some spiritual authority) tells you that suffering is good, well then suffering must actually be good. If the Church tells you that dying in order to obey some nonsense rule is good, then the nonsense rule must be good, and worth dying over. If the Church tells you that it’s just for someone to burn in hell because they ate a cheeseburger on Good Friday, then truly this must be just. And the same goes for calling things evil—what may seem to you to be good (friendships, experiences, books, ideas) must not be if it contravenes the higher goodness present in God himself.
The result is that, subtly, without even noticing it, one’s own experiences and intuitions about what’s good and bad in life are used as the basis for invalidating those very experiences and intuitions. The Church sells a concept of God based on the fantasy of stitching together a bunch of attributes and metaphors from real life, and then uses that fantasy to devalue all the real, present things that it was made out of in the first place.
And the best part is that the metaphysical reasoning that this whole system is based on doesn’t even hold water in the first place.
Appendix: Response to Matthew Guertin
Since Matthew was thoughtful enough to write a reply to my post here, I suppose I ought to make a few further points.
While the predication of a term to an object may certainly be performed with reference to an idea of what that predicate means from past experience, I don’t think there’s any reason to suppose that this idea is the “maximum” in the genus. The notion I keep in my head of “man” isn’t specifically the best or most perfect man. It is simply men in general. When I judge whether something is a “man” I judge it based on a general resemblance to that generic notion. It’s important for Thomas’s argument that the thing in a genus to which everything is referred be the most perfect because this claim goes with the other claim, that the maximum in the genus is the cause of everything in that genus.
The intelligibility of some common form could, I suppose, be an actually existing thing and not just in the mind. I don’t see any reason to suppose such forms exist generally speaking. But if they did, they wouldn’t be providing the kind of causation Aquinas needs in order for the argument to prove the existence of God. What such entities would give you is a being which represented the intelligibility of “being”. What that even means, I don’t know. This all leaves aside the problem that at least the majority of genera are mental constructs and not really in things, and that certainly includes “goodness”.
In my view, which I think aligns with a typical Thomist reading of the Fourth Way, though I may be wrong, the argument Aquinas is making depends on the real communication of forms between things. That for any genus, the existence of a form in that genus is due entirely to the communication of the form by things possessing the form. If this isn’t the case, it wouldn’t follow that there would be a maximum in the genus “good” which is the cause of all goodness. It’s not a matter of intelligibility or the relationships between concepts in the mind; it’s about real forms inhering in things. And this picture of the way the attributes of things arise and relate to each other is false (or at least, must resort to descriptive loopholes endlessly), as innumerable instances in chemistry, biology, and even ordinary human life could show.
It is nice to get a response. Thanks to Matthew for reading my thoughts and taking them seriously.
i.e., knowledge about God available to all people through reason regardless of their belief in Christianity. The Church has dogmatically committed to the availability of such knowledge, following Paul’s claims in Romans 1.