トマス・アクィナス著SUMMA CONTRA GENTILESの現代的解釈(6)(岸英司名誉教授追悼記念号)

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Not only God is Good ; he is goodness itself, the good of every good, and the highest good. These predications move from the concrete to the abstract and back to the concrete mode of signifying. Thus, Thomas moves from what can be said of God and creatures, to what can be said only of God. Then he turns to God as the ontological ground ("good of every good"), and transcendent exemplar ("highest good"). Thomas thus deploys Aristotelian means to an end embraced explicitly only in the Platonic tradition. Aristotle does refer to the life of God as most fully actual and most pleasant. Yet, in spite of his definition of the good as that which all desire, he never identifies God as exemplar of the good life. For Thomas, the speculative pursuit of first causes is identical to the practical pursuit of the good. Thomas then argues that God is one. He argues that (1) that there cannot be two highest goods, (2) that two perfect beings would be indistinguishable, and (3) that there cannot be many first movers. The logic of necessary being requires singularity. Among the sixteen arguments for uniqueness, "the most powerful and interesting" (N. Kretzman), rely for their basis in the identification of God as the entity that is necessary being through itself. Formally, the uniqueness argument is a chain of destructive dilemmas designed to reduce to absurdity the assumption that there is more than one God, where God is understood as that which is necessary being. The argument supposes that there are two entities, E1 and E2, each of which is necessary being. The argument's strategy for reducing that supposition to an absurdity consists in exhausting all possible bases on which E1 and E2 might be distinguished from each other. For instance, E1 and E2 could represent two species of that which is necessary being, carved out of that genus by two differentiae. Suppose, then, that D is E1's differentia, carving the E1 species out of the genus "necessary being". But in that case nothing could be necessary being through itself any more than anything could be just "animal" rather than a tiger or a tapeworm or some other sort of animal: "animal cannot be in actuality unless it is either rational or non-rational". If necessary being required D as a differentia, then necessary being would acquire being through something else, which is contradictory with the notion of necessary being. D could be thought of as a component of "the ratio of necessity of being as animate is included in the definition of animal", which Thomas understands to be 'sensitive animate body'. But, of course, no such essential component of E1 and of E2 could serve as D any more than sensitive, animate, or corporeal could serve as a characteristic distinguishing a tapeworm from a tiger, and so also this possibility is easily dismissed. N. Kretzman, after a detailed analysis based on formal logic, concludes: "I think the uniqueness argument succeeds".
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トマス・アクィナス著SUMMA CONTRA GENTILESの現代的解釈(6)(岸英司名誉教授追悼記念号)

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