46. Nature of God. -- The Deity may be considered in Himself and in His relations to the universe.

The attributes of God considered in Himself, are all referred to two fundamental notions, immobility and thought.

Immobility. -- The Prime Mover is absolutely and eternally quiescent. Eternal like movement itself (sunechês), He is pure actuality or form, for any admixture of potency or of matter would involve change in His being. Hence He is indivisible, all division involving transition from potency to act; and incorporeal, all corporeal things being composed of matter and form.

Thought. -- Since the Purely Actual Being involves all that is mast perfect, He must needs be intelligent. By virtue of His own substantial, undivided and indivisible thought, He comprehends His own eternal actuality. He is thought of thought ( (noêsis noêseôs). His conscious self-contemplation is His end, and His happiness is perfect. He is unaware of this world of changing things, for He could not know the latter without changing along with them.

God is the cause of all worldly change. How, or on what title?

Inasmuch as He gives the initial impulse to cosmic movement, the Prime Mover ought to be described as a motor cause. And indeed Aristotle would seem to place the prime mover in contact with the world (De Gen. et Corr., i., 6, 323); but contact is the necessary condition for motor causality (44, 3). Furthermore, the motion imparted by God to the world is circular motion, that is to say, perfect and eternal motion (55, 1). The point of contact is the periphery or the world's outer sphere (Phys., viii., 10). But does not contact between the corporeal world and its mover imply that the latter is located in space? And is the reaction of the thing moved upon the mover, reconcilable with the immutability of God? To avoid these difficulties Aristotle explains the influence of God upon the world as exerted not by way of mechanical impulse but by way of the attraction exercised by a final cause.

God is the final cause of the world, the good towards which all things tend; and it is this natural tendency of matter towards a higher and better state that sets up the eternal series of evolutions in earthly things.^{1}

Everything moves, because everything tends towards God. But as the final cause attracts by love, the inclination originated in the creature by God in no way touches or changes God Himself. Final causality does not interfere with the Divine intangibility, whereas motor causality in the strict sense would seriously compromise it. This eternal, irresistible attraction of all things towards the perfect and immutable actual being, leads to an optimistic conception of the cosmos and excludes the idea of evolution or progress from the good to the better.

{1} "On this Thought which thinks Itself, depends the world, as a thought which does not think itself but tends to do so. . . . God moves the world as final cause without moving Himself. . . . This theology is a sort of abstract monotheism. All the things and facts of nature are referred to natural causes. It is only nature taken as a whole that is made to depend on the divinity." -- BOUTROUX, Études d'histoire de philosophie. ARISTOTE, pp. 149 and 140.