| Aquinas claims that God is pure actuality, and hence self-sufficient and immutable; process theists claim that a God who genuinely loves creatures must grieve at their ills. Because grief appears to imply the lover's potentiality, dependence, and mutability, both sides view these two claims as incompatible. I seek to show that, in fact, grief need not carry these implications, and that therefore a God who is pure actuality can grieve for our sins.;I begin by arguing that sorrow for another's sin, as an act of the will, neither implies unfulfilled potency in the lover nor hinders the lover's joy in other goods. I grant, however, that such sorrow is in itself an unfulfilled, externally-dependent act, and therefore cannot be identical to God. Hence, if God grieves, this sorrow must inhere in him as a distinct reality---contrary to Aquinas's view that God is utterly simple, and therefore is identical to his action.;My main task, then, is to show that affective acts (including sorrow) can inhere in God without either presupposing potency or positing limitation in his pure actuality. My first step is to expand on Aquinas's own claim that causal actions in general inhere in a peculiar, "weak" way, without intrinsically modifying their agent. An inhering causal action would hence introduce neither actualization nor limitation into the divine agent. Such actions do, however, still actualize ordinary agents in a different way: by constituting those agents' attainment to their external end. Next, therefore, I show that this "external" actualization applies only to agents whose nature is ordered to an external end---not to God, who is his sole end. If so, a causal action could inhere in God without actualizing him either intrinsically or extrinsically (which Aquinas denies). Third, I show that affective acts, in Aquinas's view, share the property responsible for "weak" inherence---namely, "existing-toward"---and that therefore they too would not intrinsically actualize or limit God by inhering in him. Lastly, I show that (again by Aquinas's own view) a lover can have multiple affective acts without being "moved"---and thus extrinsically actualized---by the individual objects of those acts. If so, then God could have an act of sorrow without himself being either modified or fulfilled thereby. |
