A Defense of St. Thomas’ Fourth Way Through His Understanding of the Nature of Transcendental Properties and their Metaphysical Dependence on God

EXCERPT:

A Defense of St. Thomas’ Fourth Way Through His Understanding of the Nature of Transcendental Properties and their Metaphysical Dependence on God

"According to Etienne Gilson, the 20th century Thomist philosopher, of all of St. Thomas’ five proofs for the existence of God, the one that suffers from the most varied interpretations and misunderstanding is St. Thomas’ fourth way, the proof for God from gradation in things. The interpretations for this proof range from the proof being simply one of probability, to being something akin to Anselm’s ontological argument which fails to make the leap from the mental to the metaphysical, to the idea that this proof is the strongest and most formidable of the five. Gilson points out that there seem to be two ideas in the fourth proof that could be taken as ambiguous and thus lead to the multitude of interpretations amongst scholars. The first ambiguous point is whether or not the “maximum” degrees of truth, goodness, and nobility that Thomas talks about are to be understood as being maximum in a finite sense, or whether Thomas means to posit them as existing in an absolutely ultimate sense. The other ambiguous point is whether Thomas is simply establishing something like maximum qualities understood by the mind, or if the proof is able to show that these qualities also exist in a real metaphysical sense, which would adequately then demonstrate God’s existence. The goal of this paper is to defend the integrity of Thomas’ fourth proof for God by, first, laying out the argument according to the interpretation of the great Thomistic philosophers of the 20th century; then second, arguing that Thomas meant to posit the degrees of qualities in an absolutely maximum sense; and third, by demonstrating that these absolute qualities exist not only in the mind, but must exist in reality as the metaphysically necessary causes of all lower versions of the qualities."

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