Volume 28, Issue 1, 2016
Juan Eduardo Carreño
Pages 59-90
The Living God in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Traditionally divine life has been conceived as an attribute that belongs to God according to his way of acting. This thesis is based on a notion of life as a purely operational perfection and on the place in which Aquinas develops his thought about divine life in the Summa theologiae. Here we contend that these arguments are not entirely conclusive and introduce the idea that life, in its most radical meaning, is an attribute that belongs to God according to his way of being. In our view, this approach is more consistent with Thomas’s doctrine and avoids some common misunderstandings.