Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Within all things and all moments (immanent). Creator and sustainer of the universe. Purposeful.

Personal ie., can be known.

Good.

These descriptions of God are so familiar that they are often taken for granted. (They have been around for some time of course, but were brought together concisely in the West by Samuel Clarke.) In many ways they form a description of the greatest being of which humans can conceive.

God is His own essence, or God’s will is His essence (according to Thomas Aquinas). Otherwise He would be a mixture of essence and existence and therefore not be perfect. Or to put it another way, if God were not essence then He would contain some matter and not be pure form — so again He would be a mixture with the created world and therefore not perfect. (Trying to equate these descriptions with our discussions of matter, substance, form and essence in earlier chapters is, putting it mildly, something of a challenge!)

To believe in a God who is somehow less than any of the above descriptions would seem to many perhaps to be unworthy. The description above does however present a couple of difficulties that would seem to be impossible to resolve. Firstly, there is a paradox in the idea of God being transcendent as well as immanent and personal. (Christianity to some extent tries to resolve this by dividing God into three Persons.) Secondly, there is a paradox between the idea of a God outside of time and yet also

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