¹ Summa Theologiae, 142. Notice that Thomas does not subscribe to the converse thesis that God resembles creatures: see 143.

² This is the interpretation favoured by for instance McDermott: see his Summa Theologiae. A Concise Translation (London: Methuen, 1989), p. xxxiii.Google Scholar Note in particular his comment on the fifth way.

³ See Davies, Brian, Thinking About God (London: Chapman, 1985), p. 228.Google ScholarPubMed

⁴ Op. cit. 142, in McDermott's translation.

⁵ See his essay ‘On God and Mann’ in Anselmian Explorations (Notre Dame: University Press, 1987), p. 121.Google Scholar

⁶ Even Mann's version of the doctrine, which is intended to respect its original spirit, seems insufficient to underpin Thomas's argument. For on Mann's account the doctrine relates to property instances. And if God is identical with a property instance (more exactly, a rich property instance), then God is presumably not self-subsistent existence, but an individual existent. See his article on simplicity in Religious Studies (1982), 451–471.Google Scholar

⁷ On this view, we are to treat goodness as a ‘particularistic’ and not a ‘platonic’ predicate. See Alston's, essay ‘Some Suggestions for Divine Command Theorists’ in Divine Nature and Human Language. Essays in Philosophical Theology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 253–273.Google Scholar

⁸ See for instance Alston, op. cit. p. 273.

⁹ Once more, this reflects the Thomistic idea that God is not an individual being but Being-itself. The sum of individual things resembles God in so far as these things together body forth, in a spatio-temporal context, the nature of being.

¹⁰ Of course, on Alston's account, there is a sense in which created things depend for their goodness upon God, in so far as God provides the standard for judgements of goodness. However, so far as this theory is concerned, these things could exist independently of the activity of God and still be good, just as individual things in the world may be one metre in length while existing independently of the metre rule in Paris. By contrast, on the Thomistic view, the goodness of creatures reflects their dependence upon their divine source.

¹¹ This line of argument may sound unduly anthropocentric; but the claim is not that God must be perfect just as human persons are perfect, but that the nature of human perfection provides at any rate the best clue we have to the nature of divine perfection.

¹² The reference is, of course, to 1 Cor. 15.28. See The Phenomenon of Man (London: Collins, 1959), p. 322.Google Scholar

¹³ Thus Teilhard writes that: ‘As early as in St. Paul and St. John we read that to create, to fulfil and to purify the world is, for God, to unify it by uniting it organically with himself’ (op. cit. p. 322). Teilhard does not infer that God's reality is a matter for the future. Instead, on his view, God exists outside of time (and space). See for instance p. 297 of this same work.

¹⁴ A central contention of The Phenomenon of Man is that the human person, in particular the human brain, provides the pinnacle of evolutionary achievement so far, and thus the clearest example of the ultimate direction of the whole evolutionary process.

¹⁵ See for instance op. cit. p. 61.

¹⁶ In some measure, Teilhard himself seems to subscribe to the idea that there are such phenomena. Thus he remarks that ‘modern thought…is beginning to see that there is definitely more in the molecule than in the atom, more in the cell than in the molecule, more in society than in the individual…’ (Ibid. p. 294).

¹⁷ Recall that in Teilhard's view the perfect integration of individual things will at the same time heighten their differentiation. The perfection of individual things is not to be understood in terms of their fusion therefore (Ibid. p. 288).

¹⁸ These last two conditions correspond, of course, to the ideas of integration and participation we noted earlier.

¹⁹ These other approaches are clearly distinguished in Sherry's, Patrick work Spirit and Beauty (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 139–140.Google Scholar

²⁰ I take the relevance of these conditions to be self-evident, if this model is to be applied to the relation of God to the world, in the way I go on to indicate.

²¹ Of course, the model does not suggest the converse thesis that the divine life points towards the world. On the contrary, if God is a perfect aesthetic whole independently of God's relation to the world, then there is no line of projection (or at least, not a line which rests on the necessary complement relation) running from the divine nature to the character of the world. In this respect, the model conforms to the implications of the picture-original model, where the relation of resemblance is asymmetrical. (On this point, see again I 4 3.) It also reflects the traditional teaching that God does not need the world.

²² If we follow this latter approach, and locate the aesthetic perfection of the world at some future time, we may wish to suppose that this perfection will include the very individuals who exist in the present (and not simply individuals of their kind), by adding the postulate of personal immortality.

²³ We might develop these thoughts in a Berkeleian manner, by reflecting that the aesthetic perfection of the world calls for a divine observer not only so that it can be grasped as an aesthetic whole, but also so that its parts can retain their full aesthetic significance even when they are not observed by creatures.

²⁴ Strictly speaking, there may be no need to change the meaning of our terms: it may be enough to strip away some of the adventitious associations which they bear in creaturely contexts.