Walter Farrell, O.P., A Companion to the Summa (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1942), 37-40

These first three proofs have argued to the existence of God from the passivity, the activity and the contingency of things. The fourth proof argues from the perfection of things. But the argument still proceeds from the world or reality, not necessarily the world of sense experience, sense impressions, but nonetheless from the world of reality. For the real world also includes the things we understand as well as the things we feel, such things as love, justice, friendship, things that we can never grow in the garden or meet on the street but which are, for all that, decidedly realities.

The perfections in question here are only the absolute perfections that carry the note of perfection in themselves, not the relative which are perfections only because of their order to something else. Examples of such absolute perfections are animality, rationality, life, existence. And these can be roughly classified by stressing the point that they are in themselves either strictly limited or completely limitless.

As examples of the strictly limited, we may mention animality or humanity. A man is no less an animal than a lion; nor has a sickly boy less humanity than a strapping giant. These things imply definitely fixed limits. They either are or are not fully possessed; there is never any question of having a little or a great deal of them. To exceed or to fall away from the fixed limit means the complete loss of that perfection. AS examples of the limitless perfections, there are life, goodness, existence, and so on. If there are limits to these perfections in this or that individual or species, the limitation does not come for the perfection itself. We note the source of the limitation in our very manner of speech when we speak of human life and animal life, though it never occurs to us to speak of human rationality or animal rationality.

Since it is precisely from these unlimited perfections that the proof of the existence of God proceeds, it may be worthwhile pointing out some of their characteristics. Perhaps the most noticeable is that these perfections are possessed by different kinds of being in an analogous, not an identical, way; thus, for instance, we speak of a good stone, a good fruit, a good horse or a good professor according as each has its due perfection. Obviously the goodness of the professor is not identically the same as the goodness of fruit. There is proportionality there, but not identity. The second particularly noteworthy characteristic is that these perfections are realizable in different degrees; thus, in the course of one lifetime a man may be bad, of mediocre virtue, of more than average virtue, and ultimately a saint.

The fourth proof for the existence of God can be stated succinctly. In the world about us we see these perfections existing in things in greater and lesser degrees: that is, we see things that are more and less good, more and less true, and so on; we see life within human limits, animal limits, plant limits. Now these limited degrees of limitless perfections can be explained only by the existence of something to which these perfections pertain in their fullness, something which does not possess this or that degree of goodness, truth, life, but which is, by its very nature, limitless goodness, limitless truth, limitless life.

Certainly these limited degrees of limitless perfection are not explained by the natures which possess them. For what flows from the essential principles of a nature is had in its fullness; humanity is not something a man achieves after a long struggle. Moreover, perfections which flow from nature do not vary: the spoiled lapdog is not less animal as the days pass, the puppy does not grow into his animality. Yet, as a matter of fact, in the world about us these limitless perfection of goodness, life and the rest are not had in their fullness and they vary with an infinite variety.

The explanation, then, must be sought outside of the natures which possess a limited edition of a limitless virtue, that is, in some extrinsic source which has the perfection perfectly. Otherwise we meet the fundamental obstacle erected by an identification of contraries, of a potentiality bringing about its own realization, indeed, of the absence of perfection bringing about the presence of perfection. In a word, these limited editions of limitless virtues are received virtues; in the ultimate analysis, they are explicable only by some being who has not received them but to whom they belong, in their limitlessness, by the very nature of that being. Nor is this a question of a jump from the ideal to the real order. These effects—human life, the goodness of a man—are decidedly in the real order. It is not a matter of having an ideal rule by which we may measure these perfections; but of having a real, existing cause by whose action these realities have been brought into being.

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Return to Lesson 12: Why Does Truth Depend Upon Being in St. Thomas' Fourth Way?