Speculation On How Kit Fine Might Respond To Brian Davies On Aquinas (Part 1)

Philosopher of religion Brian Davies shows how strange Aquinas is on God. The provocation is Aquinas’s line early in the Summa that we cannot know what God is, only what God is not, so we should consider the ways God does not exist rather than the ways God does. Davies’s claim is that Aquinas really does think that, in a serious sense, those who speak about God do not know what they are talking about, and that this ignorance affects both sides of the argument, the person who says “God exists” and the person who says “There is no God”. 

He offers an explanation of how Aquinas can combine two things that sound incompatible: first, that we can demonstrate that God exists, and second, that we do not know what God is, and that our language and concepts fail when we try to treat God as one item among others.

Davies opens by putting Aquinas against a contemporary foil, Richard Swinburne. Swinburne says that when the theist says “God exists”, they mean something like a person without a body, an eternal spirit, free, omnipotent, omniscient, perfectly good, worthy of worship, creator and sustainer. The important extra claim for Davies is Swinburne’s methodological reassurance: theology uses ordinary words in their ordinary senses. So “knows”, “acts”, “good”, “person”, “power” all keep their everyday meanings, we are just combining them in an unusual package and in unusual degrees. God, on this approach, is like us in kind and different in degree. God is a person, rather like Descartes’s thinking thing, only with no body and with vastly more knowledge and power, and perhaps better moral character.

Davies wants us to see how far Aquinas stands from that. Aquinas would not say that our language about God works like ordinary description scaled up. He would not say that we can imagine what it is like to act as God does by imagining ourselves with bigger powers, like the power to create objects instantly. For Aquinas, that is exactly the wrong direction. If you start with a human type, a person with certain psychological powers, and then enlarge those powers, you may get a very impressive superhero, but you have not yet even begun to approach what Aquinas means by “God”. Davies is pressing the point that Aquinas is not offering a theory about the biggest agent in the universe, the most informed manager, the strongest cause among causes. Aquinas is trying to think something radically different: the source of there being a universe at all, the source of existence as such, and so not a being that sits inside the inventory of beings.

That contrast sets up Davies’s first major explanatory move: how Aquinas thinks we can know that “God exists”. Aquinas is not, in this respect, a sceptic. He thinks it can be demonstrated. A demonstration is not just any persuasive argument or rhetorical case. It is an argument with true premises that entail the conclusion, and it typically has a form that preserves truth by structure, like a syllogism. Davies gives a simple schematic pattern: all X are Y, all Y are Z, therefore all X are Z. The point is not that Aquinas thinks every good argument must look exactly like that schoolroom pattern, but that he thinks genuine knowledge requires arguments that move from what is known to what follows necessarily.

But Aquinas knows people have said that “God exists” is self evident, perhaps because “God” is defined as “that than which nothing greater can be thought”, the Anselmian formula. But Aquinas rejects the claim that “God exists” is self evident to us. For a proposition to be self evident to you, you need to understand the terms. If you do not know what God is, then “God exists” will not be self evident to you, no matter how confident you feel. So if we are to know that God exists, it will not be because the meaning of the word “God” automatically yields existence, it will be because we can argue to God from what we already know.

Davies introduces Aquinas’s distinction between two kinds of demonstration, from cause to effect and from effect to cause. This explains why Aquinas can both argue for God’s existence and insist that we do not know God’s essence. A cause to effect demonstration starts with understanding what a thing is and then infers what follows from it. So if you know, perhaps by definition in chemistry, that hydrogen is the element with atomic number one, and you know that the element with atomic number one is the lightest gas, you can then infer that hydrogen is the lightest gas. Add another premise, balloons filled with the lightest gas rise in air, and you can infer that balloons filled with hydrogen rise. The key is that you seem to start with grasping what the cause is, hydrogen, and then you infer an effect, rising balloons.

An effect to cause demonstration works the other way. You see a balloon rising, you know that rising balloons must be full of something that makes them rise, and you infer there is some lighter than air content, without necessarily knowing whether it is hydrogen, helium, or heated air. This kind of reasoning does not require a full grasp of the cause’s essence. It is enough to infer that there is some cause adequate to the effect. For Aquinas, our knowledge that God exists can only be of the second kind. We cannot argue from God’s nature to God’s effects because we do not know God’s nature. But we can argue from effects, from the world as given, to a cause that must exist if those effects are to be intelligible. This is why Aquinas’s famous “Five Ways” are structured as they are. They do not start by describing God’s inner life and then showing what would follow. They start with change, causation, contingency, degrees of perfection, and teleology, features of the world that are more known to us, and infer something that must be the case if those features are to be explained. So says Davies.

But Davies anticipates a worry. If we do not know what God is, how can we even ask “Does God exist”? Does not existence talk presuppose some grasp of the thing whose existence is in question? Davies’s answer turns on Aquinas’s distinction between real definitions and nominal definitions. A real definition tells you what an existing thing is by nature or essence. You can aim at a real definition of a cat or a rose because these are items in experience, things you can investigate, classify, and understand. A nominal definition, by contrast, tells you what a word means, not by capturing the essence of some existing thing, but by explaining how the word is used. You can have nominal definitions of “wizard” or “hobbit” even if there are no wizards or hobbits. You can explain the word without implying that the thing exists.

Davies’s claim is that Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence proceed using nominal definitions of “God”. Aquinas is not saying, here is the divine essence, now let me prove that it exists. He is saying, people traditionally use the word “God” to refer to something like a first cause, an uncaused cause, a necessary being, a source of being and goodness, an intelligent director of nature to ends. Those are minimal, non controversial, in the sense that they are close to the shared religious and philosophical usage across Jews, Muslims, and Christians, and they do not assume that we already grasp God’s essence. Aquinas then argues: given the world, there must be such a first cause, and therefore “God exists” is true, where “God” is fixed by these nominal roles.

For example, imagine you are trying to determine whether there is a “bank robber” in a town. You might not know the person’s identity, their name, their childhood, their psychology, their essential character. But you can use “the bank robber” nominally to mean “whoever robbed the bank”. You can then argue from the effects, the money is gone, the vault is drilled, the CCTV shows someone entering, to the conclusion that there was a bank robber, even though you do not know what that person is like in themselves. You have located a role that must be filled. Aquinas, Davies suggests, is doing something analogous with “God”, but at a far more radical level. The nominal definition fixes a role, the first source or ultimate explanatory terminus, and the argument is that the role cannot be left empty.

Are Aquinas’s nominal definitions too thin? Don't people mean more by “God” than “first cause” and so on? Davies replies that Aquinas is deliberately restricting what he assumes at the proof stage, precisely because he thinks we lack real knowledge of God’s essence. The “Five Ways” are not meant to be a full portrait of God. They are meant to get you to the point where you can say, there is a first cause, there is a necessary source, there is an intelligent director, and this is what people call “God”. Once you get that far, Aquinas thinks you can then begin, cautiously and mostly negatively, to say what God is not, and then, by analogy, to say certain things truly but inadequately.

Davies thinks Aquinas says we do not know what God is not merely because God is hard to understand, like a complex mathematical theorem. It is that God does not fit the categories that make understanding possible for us. Aquinas’s discussion in Summa Theologiae I, question 3, the doctrine of divine simplicity, is Davies’s main evidence. Aquinas argues that God is not composite. And he does not mean merely that God is not made of physical parts, like a machine. He means that God lacks the kinds of internal composition that characterise everything we encounter and know.

Davies's Aquinas says that God is not composed of matter and form. In Aristotelian metaphysics, ordinary physical things are composites of matter, the stuff that can take on different shapes, and form, the organising principle that makes the stuff this kind of thing rather than that. A bronze statue has bronze as matter and the statue shape as form. A living animal has bodily matter and a life organising form. Matter implies potentiality, the capacity to change, to be otherwise, to take on different forms. But Aquinas argues that the first being must be pure actuality, with no potentiality, because anything that moves from potentiality to actuality is made actual by something already actual. Change always depends on something actual. So if you trace change back to a first source, that source cannot be a changing bodily thing. Therefore God cannot be a body. If God is not a body, God is not a matter form composite.

Anything with parts or potentialities is in some way unfinished, it can be rearranged, it can be acted upon, it can be explained by reference to how it got put together. A first source cannot be like that, because then it would depend on something else to account for its parts and potentials. So Aquinas strips away bodily composition. But Aquinas goes further, and this is where Davies thinks his radicalism is located. Aquinas also denies a composition of suppositum and nature in God. Davies explains “suppositum” as the individual subject, this particular thing, Socrates rather than Plato. In creatures, Aquinas thinks there is a distinction between the individual subject and the nature it has. Socrates is an individual, and he has human nature, but that nature can be shared by many. Many humans instantiate the same nature. So the individual and the nature are not identical. Socrates is not identical with humanity as such.

Aquinas denies this in God. God is not an individual instance of a kind called “deity”, where there might in principle be multiple gods of that kind. God is not one member of a class. In God, the “individual” and the “nature” are the same, in the sense that God’s “whatness” is not separable from God’s “thisness”. Davies stresses that Aquinas is not merely saying God is unique. He is saying God is not classifiable in the way things are classifiable. Even the word “substance” is tricky. Aquinas notes that “substance” normally means something with an essence such that it exists of itself, but existence is not a genus, there is no class called “things that exist” with “existence” as the shared defining feature. So to say “God is a substance” risks importing creaturely categories.

So for Aquinas God does not have properties. In creatures, we distinguish a subject from its attributes. This apple is red, sweet, heavy. The apple is one thing, its redness is another feature, at least conceptually, and in many metaphysical pictures, really distinct. The apple could lose redness and remain the same apple. But Aquinas says God is not like that. God’s goodness is not something God has in addition to being God. God’s power is not a separate attribute attached to a subject. God’s life, goodness, knowledge, and power are all identical with God, and identical with each other because he thinks any real distinction in God would introduce composition, and composition would introduce dependence.

Is Aquinas simply contradicting himself? If wisdom and power are different, how can they be identical in God? Peter Geach suggests an analogy with mathematical functions. “The square of” and “the double of” are different functions, different ways of mapping a number to another number. But for the argument 2, both functions yield the same value 4. So, in a limited sense, the outputs coincide. The analogy is not meant to show that God is a number or that divine attributes are functions. It is meant to show that it is not automatically incoherent to say that two conceptually distinct descriptions pick out the same reality in a special case. In God, Aquinas thinks, the “individualisation” of perfections like wisdom and power are not distinct from each other, nor from God. God is all that God has.

Aquinas is mostly doing negative work here. He is telling you what you must not think if you are thinking correctly about the first source. That is why Aquinas’s initial claim, we know what God is not, becomes plausible. If God is not composite, not bodily, not one of a kind, not a subject that has attributes, then our ordinary way of knowing, which depends on classifying and attributing properties, does not fit. Aquinas then deepens the simplicity claim by denying composition of essence and existence in God.  Creatures have essences, what they are, and they also exist, that they are. For Aquinas, in creatures, essence and existence are distinct. You can understand what a phoenix is, a bird reborn from ashes, without that understanding guaranteeing that any phoenix exists. Even for ordinary things, you can understand the essence of “cat” without that essence itself forcing cats to exist. Existence comes, as it were, on top of essence. So creatures have existence as an effect.

God, Aquinas says, is not like that. God’s essence is existence. God is his own existence, ipsum esse subsistens. Davies highlights Aquinas’s claim that the most appropriate name for God is “he who is”, qui est, because it is the least determinate. Any other name picks out some aspect, some determination, some restricted feature, which suits creatures but not God. “He who is” aims at pure being without specifying a kind. Aquinas even uses the striking image from Damascene, an infinite ocean of being, unlimited. Davies notes that some philosophers contest whether existence can be predicated of individuals in this way, arguing that “exists” is not a property of an object but a feature of our concepts or quantifiers. But Davies’s point is to state what Aquinas is doing. Aquinas is not trying to define God by saying “God is existence” as if that is a neat positive concept. He is trying to deny that God is created, deny that God’s being is received (this is a theological idea, so creatures have existence as something other than their essence and this existence is us received!), deny that God’s actuality depends on anything else. Saying God is existence itself is Aquinas’s way of indicating that God is not one more existent, but the source of existence.

Think of a lamp and the light in a room. The lamp has a certain design, shape, and function, that is like its essence in a loose everyday sense, and then it is either switched on or off. When it is on, there is light in the room. When it is off, there is not. The lamp can be fully understood as a lamp even if it is unplugged. Its “what it is” does not guarantee its “that it is giving light now”. The light is received and dependent. Aquinas’s thought is that creatures are like that. Their natures do not entail their existence, they receive existence. But God is not like a lamp receiving power, or like an object switching on, because that would already imply dependence. God is more like the condition for there being any power and any switching and any receiving at all. The analogy is crude and Aquinas would reject it if taken literally, but it can help convey the direction. God is not a thing that has existence the way a lamp has electricity, God is the source of the very fact that things exist.

All of this sets up Davies’s discussion of Aquinas on creation. Davies tries to correct what he sees as a widespread misunderstanding. Many people hear “God created the universe” and think it means God started it at a first moment long ago, like someone lighting the first fuse. They then tie belief in creation to a belief that the universe must have a temporal beginning. Aquinas does not do that. Aquinas believes the world began, but he thinks that is known by faith, not by philosophical demonstration. Philosophically, Aquinas allows that the world could be eternal in time. Yet he would still insist it is created. Why? Because for Aquinas, creation is not fundamentally about a first event in time. It is about the ongoing dependence of everything that exists on a universal cause of its existence. God creates by making things exist for as long as they exist, whether or not there was a beginning.

Davies quotes Aquinas saying it is not enough to look at how this or that particular being arises from some particular cause, we must consider the issuing of the whole of being from the universal cause, and this issuing is what we call creation. Creation is ex nihilo, out of nothing, in the sense that it presupposes no underlying stuff that is transformed. When a carpenter makes a table, they presuppose wood. When an artist makes a sculpture, they presuppose clay or bronze. But creation, for Aquinas, is not making by rearranging. It is the introduction of being as such, the granting of existence. That is why Aquinas can say the world exists just as long as God wills it, its existence depends on God as cause.

But if creation is a kind of making, is it not a change? Does it not modify something? In our ordinary experience, to make something is to bring about a difference in some material. Even an efficient cause, in Aristotle’s sense, is normally tied to change, something being moved from potentiality to actuality. Aquinas does think of God as an efficient cause, an agent cause, but he also says divine creation is a unique kind of efficient causation, one that does not bring about change, because there is no prior subject that undergoes transformation from not being to being. There is no “patient” that first exists and then gets modified. There is simply a creature which exists, and its existence is wholly dependent.

Aristotle and Aquinas do not reduce causality to constant conjunction, one event regularly following another, as Hume might. They think an efficient cause is active in its effect. Action and passion are two ways of describing one and the same change, action insofar as it comes from the agent, passion insofar as it is in the patient. Drawing the drapes is one change described from two sides. But creation ex nihilo is not like drawing drapes, because there is no prior drape that then gets drawn by a change. The very being of the creature is the effect. So creation stretches our ordinary causal concepts to breaking point.

Anthony Flew’s phrase, “the death by a thousand qualifications” is a criticism of religious language, the idea that believers keep qualifying their claims so that nothing counts against them, until the claim loses content. Davies however says Aquinas would welcome this death by a thousand qualifications. That is, Aquinas thinks that if you speak properly about God, you will be forced to qualify and stretch language, because God is not within the range of ordinary concepts. If your theology is too neat, too easily pictured, too close to ordinary descriptions, then for Aquinas it is probably idolatrous in the sense of substituting a creaturely model for the creator.

Davies thinks a basic reason running through Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence is the thought that what is most philosophically arresting is not how the world is, but that it is. Davies cites Wittgenstein’s remark that what is mystical is not how things are but that the world exists. Wittgenstein concluded that one should fall silent. Aquinas, by contrast, tries to keep talking, while also acknowledging that language is stretched to breaking point. He tries to say more than he can mean, not in the sense of babbling nonsense, but in the sense that he is trying to use creaturely words to point beyond their ordinary range. This returns to Aquinas’s initial claim: we know better what God is not than what God is, because any positive portrait risks treating God as an item in the world.

But is not Aquinas famous for saying that we can speak literally about God, by analogy, not merely figuratively? If Aquinas allows literal positive predication, does that not contradict the apophatic emphasis? Davies’s answer is that Aquinas’s account of analogy is precisely designed to secure two things at once: that our God talk is not sheer equivocation, and that it still fails to grasp the divine essence.

Equivocation is when a word is used in completely different senses, like “bat” meaning an animal and “bat” meaning a piece of sports equipment. If theological language were purely equivocal, arguments about God would collapse, because the middle terms would shift meaning. Aquinas wants to avoid that. But he also wants to avoid univocity, the idea that words like “good” mean exactly the same thing when applied to God and creatures. That, Aquinas thinks, would drag God into the creaturely category, making God a being among beings. Analogy is his middle path. When we say “this person is good” and “God is good”, we are not speaking univocally, but we are also not speaking with unrelated meanings. The words are connected through causality: creatures have perfections because God is the source of those perfections. If you cannot give what you do not have, then the cause must in some way contain the perfection it gives, though in a higher mode. Therefore creatures resemble God to some extent, not as equals, but as effects resemble a cause.

Davies stresses that for Aquinas, analogy is literal, not metaphorical. It is not that “God is good” is as if we might say “the sunset is kind”. Aquinas thinks there is a truth but the truth is limited by our way of signifying. This is the key Aquinas distinction Davies highlights, that the perfection signified may belong to God more properly than to creatures, but the mode of signifying, the way the word functions in our language, is creaturely, and so inappropriately applied. We can speak truly but inadequately.

Davies uses Aquinas’s own explanation. We cannot see God’s essence in this life. We know God only from creatures, as their source, and then as surpassing them, and as lacking creaturely limitations. So we use words derived from creaturely experience. Sometimes we use abstract nouns, goodness, wisdom, to indicate simplicity. Sometimes we use concrete nouns, good, wise, to indicate subsistence. But neither mode measures up to God’s way of being. The grammar of subject and predicate itself reveals our limitation. Subject and predicate are two ways of looking at a thing, and affirming them together indicates that it is one thing being looked at. God in himself is altogether one and simple, but we think of him through multiple concepts because we cannot see him as he is. We then attribute these different concepts to God as if God were a subject with properties. Aquinas says this is a necessary crutch for our minds. Our minds cannot understand subsisting simple forms as they are in themselves, we understand them like composite things, with a subject and forms in it. So we apprehend a simple form as if it were a subject and attribute something to it. That is, even when we speak literally and truly, we are always signifying imperfectly.

For example, suppose you are trying to describe a piece of music you love to someone who has never heard music. You might say it is joyful, or it is tense, or it is complex, or it is calm. Each word names something real about the experience, but the person without music has to map those words onto their familiar experiences, perhaps joy at a birthday, tension before an exam, complexity in a puzzle. They may get some truth, but the way they understand the words does not match the thing itself. The limitation is not only in the listener, it is in the fact that the words are pulled from a different domain. Aquinas thinks something like this is happening for all creaturely terms applied to God, only far more radically, because the gap is not between two sensory domains but between created being and the uncreated source of being.

Swinburne and many people, believers and non believers alike, think of God as the biggest thing around, the top person, a supreme individual, like Thor in the Marvel franchise perhaps. Aquinas is “agnostic” in a special sense. Not that Aquinas doubts God’s existence, Aquinas believes God exists and thinks it can be demonstrated. But Aquinas is agnostic about what God is, because he thinks God is not a knowable thing among things. Modern agnosticism might say, we do not know, the universe is a mysterious riddle, perhaps there is no answer. Aquinas says, we do not know what the answer is, but we do know there is a mystery behind it all, and without that mystery there would not even be a riddle. If there were no God, there would be no universe to be mysterious and nobody to be mystified. 

Seen as a whole, Davies’s point is that Aquinas is trying to retrain the imagination to stop you picturing God as an entity inside the universe, no matter how impressive. Aquinas thinks we can reason to God from the world, but precisely because we reason from effects, our conclusion does not deliver a grasp of the divine essence. It delivers a boundary, a terminus of explanation, a source that must not be modelled on creatures. This is why Aquinas thinks speakers about God, including devout ones, do not know what they are talking about in the sense of being able to form an adequate concept.This also is why Davies thinks Aquinas matters for atheists as well as theists. Many atheist critiques target a God who is a cosmic person, a super agent, a designer within time, a being with properties in the way we have properties. Aquinas would say, if that is what you mean by God, you should stop and think again, because you are criticising an idol, not what “God” is supposed to name. That does not refute atheism, but it changes what is being denied. It forces a different question -  not “is there a very powerful person without a body?” but “is there a universal source of being, not itself one being among others, upon which the existence of everything depends?” 

Davies knows Aquinas might be wrong. But he is insisting that Aquinas’s way of framing the question is philosophically serious, historically central, and too often ignored because it is so hard to keep in view. Aquinas is both bold and cautious at once. Bold, because he thinks you can demonstrate that God exists, and because he articulates a demanding metaphysics of simplicity, essence and existence, creation, and analogy. Cautious, because at every stage he warns you that your words are inadequate, your concepts are creaturely, your grammar distorts, and your mind cannot see God as God is. The result is a peculiar discipline of speech. Aquinas will not be silent like Wittgenstein, but he will keep speaking while constantly undercutting his own images. He will use ordinary words, but not in their ordinary sense. He will affirm perfections, but deny that God has properties. He will call God good, wise, living, but deny composition and deny that these names capture the divine essence. He will call God creator, but deny that creation is a change like other makings. Flew's “death by a thousand qualifications” is not a collapse for Aquinas, it is the signature of intellectual honesty when you are trying to refer to what cannot be fitted into creaturely categories.

So now I want to bring in Kit Fine as the metaphysician whose tools, as I tried to show when discussing the works of David Lynch I repeatedly used to describe worlds where our ordinary templates for identity, embodiment, necessity, location, and explanation stop behaving. I think Fine is useful here because he does not treat “necessity” as one flat operator that we sprinkle over sentences, he treats necessity as coming from sources, and he treats the structure of things, what they are, how they depend, how they are grounded, as prior to the modal talk that so often gets asked to do all the work. I suggest that that is close to what Davies is trying to make us hear in Aquinas, that if you treat God as a person with scaled up ordinary properties, you have already missed the metaphysical source of the relevant “must”.

In my Lynch essays I kept returning to a Finean habit of mind of not forcing everything into one canonical way of being. In the erotic and bodies essays, my claim was that Lynch repeatedly asks bodies to sustain incompatible embodiments, without any guarantee that there is a single underlying form that reconciles them, and the unease arises where “too many necessities coexist without collapsing into one”.  I took that as a vivid cinematic way of introducing Fine’s broader pluralism about necessity, the thought that there are different irreducible kinds of “must”, natural, normative, metaphysical, affective, and that you do not understand what is happening if you flatten them into one uniform necessity claim. My Blue Velvet essay makes this explicit, it says the film resists a single necessity claim, and that Fine’s idea that necessity is plural becomes a description of what the film is doing, as it moves from the indifferent compulsion of insects under grass to the perverse compulsion of domination in a room. Once you have that Finean pluralism in your hands, you can see Davies’s Aquinas as operating with something like a disciplined refusal of the wrong modality. 

A Swinburne style picture, as Davies presents it, treats “God exists” as roughly like “there exists a person”, only a special kind of person. Aquinas thinks that is using ordinary existential grammar, plus ordinary property attribution, plus an ordinary scale model, and then assuming that the metaphysical distance between creatures and creator is just quantitative. Davies thinks that Aquinas will not allow that. God is not one member of a kind, God does not have properties the way creatures do, and God is not even comfortably described as a substance in the way the word functions for created things. 

What Fine contributes here is a way of making that refusal feel like a serious metaphysical move rather than a mystical gesture. Fine keeps saying, in effect, stop assuming there is one privileged way objects must be in order to be real, and stop assuming there is one privileged way explanation must run in order to count as explanation. That attitude shows up in my Eraserhead piece when I say Fine refuses to force persistence and location into one canonical representation, and uses the rainbow as a model for the idea that location can be genuinely perspective relative, not always a projection of one underlying true location.  

The point is not to turn God into a rainbow, obviously, but to loosen the grip of a default template. If your default template is, real things are located chunks of matter with clear boundaries, and if your default template is, real explanations are always causal stories about changes in such chunks, then Aquinas will look like he is talking nonsense. Fine’s practice is to show that even within the created order we already accept entities whose being does not match that template, social entities, institutional entities, perspective relative entities (e.g. rainbows), and that we can thicken our ontology without losing our minds.  This makes it easier to understand why Aquinas thinks our ordinary categories are not entitled to legislate the conditions of intelligibility for God.

Take Davies’s central Aquinas claim that God does not have properties, that God’s goodness, power, knowledge are not really distinct features attached to a subject, but are identical with God. Davies uses Geach’s analogy of functions to show that it need not be sheer contradiction to say two different descriptions pick out one reality in a special case. Fine’s contribution is not that he would endorse Aquinas’s doctrine of simplicity, but that he has a way of redescribing what is at stake without making it sound like a verbal trick. In my Lynch essays, “erotic predicates” are treated as “special feature” predicates, they do not pick out a simple detachable part, they select an aspect of a complex whole, voice, gaze, script, coercion, and the selection itself matters for what is being said.  This is me trying out a Finean move, to treat predication as aspect selection rather than as always attaching a separable property to a separable subject. If you apply that to Aquinas, you can see why subject predicate grammar might systematically mislead (Galen Strawson argues that Nietzsche took this view.) 

Aquinas says we are forced to talk in subject predicate form, because our minds understand simple things through the lens of composites, but the form of the sentence does not mirror the metaphysical structure of what is being spoken about. Davies’s Aquinas says we signify imperfectly. Fine offers a more general metaphysical diagnosis of why that can happen, arguing that our language is built to carve up complex structured wholes by selecting aspects, but the metaphysical joints of a thing might not align with the grammatical joints of our sentences. 

In created cases, that yields puzzles about social objects, institutions, roles, and mixed character entities, a committee that depends on attitudes, or a place that is both a room and an institutional operator, like Club Silencio being both a location and a coercive confession machine.  In divine cases, on Aquinas’s view, the mismatch becomes total, because the thing in question is not within any shared genus with creatures.

Now notice how Davies’s Aquinas argues for God. He insists that we can only demonstrate from effects to cause, because we do not know the cause’s essence. Fine is famous for saying that essence is prior to modality, that what something is grounds what is necessary or possible for it. That “essence first” stance does not automatically map onto Aquinas, but it changes the feel of the argument. Aquinas says, we cannot start from God’s essence, we do not know it. Fine says, modal truths are grounded in essence, not in a primitive global necessity operator. Put those together and you get a very sharp picture of what Aquinas is doing when he insists on demonstration from effects. He is not saying, we reason from the world to a being whose attributes we then list like a dossier. He is saying, we reason from the world to a source, but the source is precisely that which we cannot place within our essence classifying scheme. That is why Aquinas’s proofs use nominal definitions, minimal role descriptions, rather than real definitions. 

A Finean gloss would be, Aquinas is operating with role fixing without essence grasp, and then using the role to constrain what can be true, while refusing to pretend that role fixing yields de re knowledge of the source’s nature. My Lost Highway essay gives you a cinematic model for the difference between a mere redistribution of properties and a deep change that would require a change of essence. It says a Fine leaning reading treats the “Pete” persona not as a new being but as an essentially dependent persona, generated by an attempt to reconstitute the self under a different description, and that the film’s loop is a dependence structure rather than a tour through a space of alternative worlds.  

That language, dependent persona, dependence structure, essential constraint, is exactly the kind of vocabulary Fine brings to metaphysical puzzles that otherwise get flattened into “it could have been otherwise”. Now apply that to Davies’s Aquinas on creation. Davies stresses that Aquinas’s creation is not a change in something, it is not a transformation of pre existing stuff, it is the dependence of the creature’s existence at every moment on a universal cause. Aquinas thinks creatures have existence as an effect, God does not. 

Fine’s grounding talk is an unusually good fit for the structure of that claim. “Grounding” is just a disciplined way of saying, not merely that A causes B, but that B holds in virtue of A, that A is what makes B the case at the most basic explanatory level. For example, a triangle has three angles summing to 180 degrees in virtue of what it is to be a Euclidean triangle and that is not a causal story, it is a dependence story. Or think about this. Someone is a citizen in virtue of legal and institutional facts, not in virtue of their blood type. Fine has used this style of dependence to make sense of entities that are real but not reducible to the brute physical. In my fat ontology levers piece, my claim was that you can treat unusual entities in the film as genuine constituents of a wider structured whole, even if their presence conditions do not match the default template for material things, and you should stop being frightened of fat ontologies.  

That is a nice preparatory move for Aquinas, because Aquinas is telling you, creation is not like sculpting clay, it is not a within nature modification, it is the dependence of the whole creaturely order on what is not itself one item in that order. Obviously Fine’s metaphysics does not prove Aquinas, but it makes the shape of the dependence claim intelligible.

This is also where Fine’s insistence on distinguishing kinds of necessity can be used to diagnose exactly the Swinburne Aquinas conflict. Swinburne says theology uses ordinary words in ordinary senses, and then adds unusual degrees. Aquinas says, no, the words must be stretched, and the stretching is not optional. Fine’s pluralism gives a clean way of seeing why. If you keep only one modal operator in play, you will treat divine necessity as just the strongest version of the same “must” we meet in nature, metaphysics or in logic. But Fine says, there are different “musts”, and their sources differ. In my Blue Velvet essay, the difference between the natural necessity of insects and the normative necessity of ritualised domination is crucial because the horror is not just that violence exists, it is that a local law, a coerced must, binds people in the room.  

Translating this all back to Aquinas, the divine “must” is not a natural must, like gravity, and not a human normative must, like the rules of a club, and not even simply a logical must, like a tautology. Aquinas’s claim that God is pure act, without potentiality, is meant to place God outside the change bound necessities that govern creatures. Aquinas’s claim that God is ipsum esse, existence itself, is meant to place God outside genus membership. If you are Fine, you will naturally ask what the source of the relevant necessity claims is. Are they grounded in essence, grounded in identity, grounded in the structure of explanation, grounded in dependence? That question about source is the question Swinburne’s picture makes too easy by treating God as an object with properties.

Fine also helps us see a subtlety in Davies’s handling of Aquinas’s negative theology. Davies insists Aquinas is not painting a portrait of God, he is denying creaturely compositions, matter and form, supposit and nature, essence and existence, properties distinct from subject. If you read that negatively, you might think Aquinas is just removing content until nothing is left. Fine’s metaphysical practice gives you a way to see negative claims as structural constraints rather than as evacuations. Think of how in my Lost Highway essay I treated the Mystery Man under a Fineish reading, so he wasn't a fixed cross-world constant but a constitutive figure, a part of the rules of re identification, policing what counts as the same person across transformation.  

That was a kind of negative characterisation too. You learn what the Mystery Man is by learning what he is not, not just another character, not just a hallucination, not just an invariant observer, but a structural ingredient in the identity mechanics of the film. Aquinas’s God, on Davies’s telling, is similarly approached by what you might call structural negation. God is not composite, not bodily, not one of a kind, not a property bearer, not a substance in a genus, not an essence receiving existence. These are constraints on what could count as an ultimate ground of being. Fine’s taste for dependence structures helps this, because a dependence structure is often best described by telling you which dependence relations cannot obtain, which reductions are illicit, which explanatory chains cannot continue.

There is a further Finean tool that can be used to sharpen Davies’s Aquinas, the notion of variable embodiment. In my Lynchean bodies and erotic essay, the prison transformation in Lost Highway is described as matter persisting while form changes, and Fine’s metaphysics is invoked as handling the idea that an enduring object can be manifested by incompatible rigid embodiments without a deeper fact reconciling them.  

Whether one buys that interpretation of Fine in the film case, the tool is clear enough for present purposes. It lets you distinguish between the underlying thing and its modes of manifestation. Now, Aquinas is not saying God is a thing with multiple embodiments, and he is certainly not saying God takes on different rigid embodiments as creatures do. But the variable embodiment tool illuminates why Aquinas insists that we can make some literal affirmations about God and yet fail to know God’s essence. Our predicates may latch onto manifestations of perfection in creatures, wisdom, goodness, power, and through causal dependence we may be licensed to apply them to God analogically. Davies emphasises that this analogical predication is both literal yet inadequate. Fine’s aspect selection talk gives a way of seeing how this can work without univocity. We can pick out a perfection as it appears in creatures, then pick out its source in God, but the mode of being of that perfection in God is not the mode of being it has in creatures. The same word tracks a dependence relation, not a shared genus. 

That is very close to Aquinas’s claim that perfections belong primarily to God and only secondarily to creatures, while the way we signify them is creaturely and therefore inappropriately applied.

In my ontological laugh essay I call Club Silencio a metaphysical sermon and conclude not that there is nothing there, but that the object’s mode of being is not what you assumed so that the voice can be there without the singer singing, affect without stable cause, love without coherent lovers.  

That is a Finean style point about modes of being, about presence conditions, about not treating reality as exhausted by the simplest causal story. Aquinas is doing something similar but is far more austere. He is saying, the creator’s mode of being is not what you assume when you say “God exists” as if it were “a person exists”. Existence language works one way for creatures and another way, if it works at all, for the creator. Davies quotes Aquinas calling “he who is” the most appropriate name because it is least determinate. The Finean instinct here is to ask, what determinations are you illicitly importing when you use more specific names? In Lynch, the illicit import is often the assumption that the voice must be tied to a visible body, or that the identity must be tied to one stable narrative role. In Aquinas, the illicit import is the assumption that being must be genus membership plus property predication plus temporal location.

Fine’s rainbow point about location can also be repurposed, carefully, to make Davies’s Aquinas on transcendence feel less like spatial mysticism. Aquinas says God is outside the realm of existence as a cause from which everything pours forth. A quick misunderstanding is to imagine God as located somewhere else, in a hidden place, in a higher room, in a separate region. Fine’s rainbow example helps resist that, because the rainbow is not elsewhere, and yet its location is not a simple chunk of matter at a unique coordinate.  Again, the point is not that God is like a rainbow, the point is that “outside” need not mean spatially beyond. It can mean outside the template that treats all real things as items within the same location framework. Aquinas’s “outside being” talk is an attempt to say, God is not included in any classification with creatures. 

Fine’s practice of allowing perspective relative location in the created order makes it easier to imagine that “outside” can be a claim about explanatory and ontological status, not about geography. A Finean reading also clarifies something about Davies’s anxiety that modern atheism often targets the wrong God. My Lynch essays repeatedly resist “thin ontology” strategies that try to explain away the weirdness in the films by saying it is “just” a dream, “just” trauma, “just” desire, “just” Hollywood. The Eraserhead essay says those reductions are like the philosopher who says “strictly speaking” and then rewrites ordinary talk to fit an ontological prejudice for deserts.  

Davies’s Aquinas is, in a very different register, resisting the opposite prejudice, the prejudice for a too familiar ontology of divine personhood. But the shared shape is the same: in both cases, you lose the phenomenon by forcing it into a template designed for easier cases. Atheism aimed at a cosmic person may be accurate as a rejection of that template, but Aquinas would say it is not a rejection of what the word “God” is trying, under strain, to point to.

I'm obviously guessing how Fine himself, as a working metaphysician, might respond to Davies’s Aquinas. Fine would likely sympathise with the idea that modality and essence are not to be treated as a single blunt instrument, and he would likely appreciate the insistence that deep metaphysics often forces revisions in how we understand predication, identity, and explanation. 

I imagine Fine could easily resist Aquinas’s specific theses, especially if he thinks they overreach or collapse distinctions Fine wants to preserve. The Lynch essays themselves show a Fineish suspicion of global monism about necessity, and a Fineish attraction to distinguishing different kinds of necessity, including affective and narrative necessity grounded in the essence of a character’s psychic economy.  Aquinas, as Davies presents him, sometimes sounds like he is pushing everything towards one ultimate simplicity, one ultimate identity of attributes, one ultimate act of being. Fine might ask whether that move respects the plural sources of necessity, or whether it turns the creator into a metaphysical vacuum cleaner, sucking every distinction into a single undifferentiated “is”. 

Yet Fine might also say, the very point of an ultimate ground could be that it sits at a different level of explanation, so the plural necessities we meet within creation do not constrain the structure of the ground itself. The pluralism could be downstream.

This is where grounding becomes the bridge. Aquinas says God is the creator at every moment, not just at the beginning, and creation is not a change, but the dependence of existence as such. Fine’s metaphysics gives you the conceptual room to treat that as a grounding claim rather than as a causal claim, and to treat Aquinas’s negative theology as a sequence of constraints on what could count as the ultimate ground. My Lynch essays repeatedly treat films as metaphysical machines, testing what sort of modal metaphysics is being staged.  Davies is treating Aquinas in the same spirit, as offering a metaphysical machine that tests what sort of God survives when you take dependence and simplicity seriously. 

Fine’s approach I guess would be to ask, what is the dependence structure, what grounds what, which necessities are grounded in which essences, and which explanatory chains terminate where? On that approach, Aquinas’s insistence that we know God from effects looks like an insistence that we only ever track God via grounding traces in creatures, and that our language is therefore always an aspect selecting, creature shaped way of pointing to a source that is not itself available for direct essence capture.

This also makes sense of Davies’s insistence that Aquinas is both willing to speak literally and forced to admit inadequacy. I used Fine’s framework in the Lynch essays to say, yes, some statements are literally true even when the object’s mode of being is not the one you assumed, the voice can be there without the singer singing, the object can be there without being a chunk of matter at a coordinate, the self can persist through incompatible embodiments without there being a single reconciliatory story.  

Aquinas’s analogous predication is, in a way, a theological version of that metaphysical discipline, literal truth that does not imply that your conceptual model fits the thing. You can say God is good and mean it, but you must not infer that God is a subject with a property called goodness, because that would import composition. You can say God creates and mean it, but you must not infer that creation is a within nature change.

One way to see the overall fit is to return to the opening of the Blue Velvet essay, which insists that the film’s movement from postcard surface to carnivore insects is not just a message but a regime of appearance, a way of looking that requires not looking, and that this sets up different kinds of compulsion, different kinds of “must”.  

Davies’s Aquinas is also talking about a regime of appearance, but at the metaphysical level. Our ordinary language is a regime of appearance, it frames reality in subject predicate form, it treats being as genus membership, it treats causation as change, it treats explanation as within a shared field of objects. Aquinas insists that if you follow the dependence traces all the way down, you reach something that breaks the regime. Fine’s insights from my Lynch essays make that break like a pressure point in our metaphysical toolkit, a point where the default template cannot handle the object. 

In Lynch, that pressure point is experienced as dread and erotic unease because bodies, identities, and norms are forced into incompatible embodiments. In Aquinas, the pressure point is experienced as apophatic discipline because the source of being cannot be fitted into any creaturely embodiment at all.

So if Fine were approaching Davies’s Aquinas, I'm claiming that he would likely start by asking what kind of explanatory relation Aquinas is claiming, and would try to rewrite “creation” as a grounding relation rather than as a temporal causal relation. He would then ask what necessities Aquinas is invoking, and would separate logical constraints from metaphysical constraints from normative and affective pressures, refusing to let one “must” do all the work. He would treat Aquinas’s simplicity claims as a set of structural prohibitions on dependence. So he'd say that if God is ultimate, God cannot depend on parts, cannot depend on a form received by matter, cannot depend on an essence receiving existence, and he would ask whether those prohibitions cohere with an essence first framework, or whether they require revising what we mean by essence in the divine case. 

He would finally treat theological language, not as ordinary language used straight, but as aspect selecting discourse, tracing perfections in creatures back to a source, while acknowledging that the way we signify is creaturely. That is, he would likely approach Davies’s Aquinas the way my Lynch essays approach Lynch, as an encounter with an object whose mode of being forces us to distinguish kinds of necessity, track dependence structures, and accept that literal truth does not guarantee conceptual adequacy.