Thomas Aquinas and the Unity of Substantial Form

Abstract

Arthur Lovejoy presented St. Thomas Aquinas as having tried to hold two different conceptions of the universe as a whole that were irreconcilable with one another, and of thereby leaving us with the "painful spectacle of a great intellect endeavoring by spurious or irrelevant distinctions to evade the consequences of its own principles, only to achieve in the end an express self-contradiction" ( The Great Chain of Being 78). This chapter shows how Aquinas uses the principle of perfection to account for why and how there are diverse kinds of perfection in a universe that is freely created, with a perfection of its own as universe, and how he maintains these different types of perfections to be de facto a matter of formal necessity in the universe itself distinct from the formal necessity by which the Creator wills itself, even in willing a universe of things other than itself. Keywords:Arthur Lovejoy; perfection of the universe; principle of perfection; St. Thomas Aquinas; The Great Chain of Being