That which comes at the top of the scale, absolute form, is called by Aristotle, God. And the definitions of God's character follow from this as a matter of course. First, since form is actuality, God alone is absolutely actual. He alone is real. All existent things are more or less unreal. The higher in the scale are the more real, as possessing more form. The scale of being is thus also a scale of reality, shading off through infinite gradations [{284}] from the absolutely real, God, to the absolutely unreal, formless matter. Secondly, since the principle of form contains the formal, the final, and the efficient causes, God is all these. As formal cause, He is the Idea. He is essentially thought, reason. As final cause, He is the absolute end. He is that to which all beings strive. Each being has no doubt its own end in itself. But as absolute end, God includes all lower ends. And as the end of each thing is the completed perfection of the thing, so, as absolute end, God is absolute perfection. Lastly, as efficient cause, God is the ultimate cause of all motion and becoming. He is the first mover. As such, He is Himself unmoved. That the first mover should be itself unmoved is a necessary consequence of Aristotle's conception of it as end and form. For motion is the transition of a thing towards its end. The absolute end can have no end beyond it, and therefore cannot be moved. Likewise motion is the passage of matter into form. Absolute form cannot pass into any higher form, and is therefore unmoved. But the argument which Aristotle himself more frequently uses to establish the immovability of the first mover is that, unless we so conceive it, no cause of motion appears. The moving object is moved perhaps by another moving object. The motion of the latter demands a further cause. If this further cause is itself moving, we must again ask for the cause of its motion. If this process goes on for ever, then motion is unexplained, and no real cause of it has been shown. The real and ultimate cause must therefore be unmoved.
This last argument sounds as if Aristotle is now thinking in terms of mechanism. It sounds as if he meant that [{285}] the first mover is something at the beginning of time, which, so to speak, gave things a push to start them off. This is not what Aristotle means. For the true efficient cause is the final cause. And God is the first mover only in His character as absolute end. As far as time is concerned, neither the universe, nor the motion in it, ever had any beginning. Every mechanical cause has its cause in turn, and so ad infinitum. God is not a first cause, in our sense, that is, a first mechanical cause which existed before the world, and created it. He is a teleological cause working from the end. But as such, He is logically prior to all beginning, and so is the first mover. And just as the universe has no beginning in time, so it has no end in time. It will go on for ever. Its end is absolute form, but this can never be reached, because if it were, this would mean that absolute form would exist, whereas we have seen that form cannot exist apart from matter.
God is thought. But the thought of what? As absolute form, he is not the form of matter, but the form of form. His matter, so to speak, is form. Form, as the universal, is thought. And this gives us Aristotle's famous definition of God as "the thought of thought." He thinks only his own self. He is at once the subject and the object of his thought. As mortal men think material things, as I now think the paper on which I write, so God thinks thought. In more modern terms, he is self-consciousness, the absolute subject-object. That God should think anything other than thought is inconceivable, because the end of all other thought is outside the thought itself. If I think this paper, the end of my thought, the paper, is outside me. But the thought of [{286}] God, as the absolute end, cannot have any end outside itself. Were God to think anything else than thought, he would be determined by that which is not himself. By way of further expression of the same idea, Aristotle passes into figurative language. God, he says, lives in eternal blessedness, and his blessedness consists in the everlasting contemplation of his own perfection.
A modern will naturally ask whether Aristotle's God is personal. It does not do to be very dogmatic upon the point. Aristotle, like Plato, never discusses the question. No Greek ever did. It is a modern question. What we have to do, then, is to take the evidence on both sides. The case for personality is that the language Aristotle uses implies it. The very word God, used instead of the Absolute, or form, conveys the idea of personality. And when he goes on to speak of God living in eternal blessedness, these words, if taken literally, can mean nothing except that God is a conscious person. If we say that this language is merely figurative, it may be replied that Aristotle on principle objects to figurative language, that he frequently censures Plato for using it, that what he demands and sets out to supply is exact, literal, scientific terminology, and that he is not likely to have broken his own canons of philosophic expression by using merely poetical phrases.
To see the other side of the case, we must first ask what personality means. Now without entering into an intricate discussion of this most elusive idea, we may answer that personality at any rate implies an individual and existent consciousness. But, in the first place, God is absolute form, and form is the universal. What is universal, with no particular in it, cannot be an individual. [{287}] God, therefore, cannot be individual. Secondly, form without matter cannot exist. And as God is form without matter, he cannot be called existent, though he is absolutely real. God, therefore, is neither existent nor individual. And this means that he is not a person. To degrade the real to the level of the existent, to convert the universal into the individual, is exactly the fault for which Aristotle blames Plato. It is exactly the fault which it was the whole object of his philosophy to remedy. If he thought that God is a person, he committed the same fault himself in an aggravated form.
We have, then, two hypotheses, both of which involve that Aristotle was guilty of some inconsistency. If God is not a person, then Aristotle's language is figurative, and his use of such language is inconsistent with his rooted objection to its use. This, however, is, after all, merely an inconsistency of language, and not of thought. It does not mean that Aristotle really contradicted himself. It merely means that, though he set himself to express his philosophy in technical scientific terms, and to exclude figurative language, yet he found himself compelled in a few passages to make use of it. There are some metaphysical ideas so abstract, so abstruse, that it is almost impossible to express them at all without the use of figures of speech. Language was made by common men for common purposes, and this fact often forces the philosopher to use terms which he knows only figure forth his meaning without accurately expressing it. Perhaps every philosophy in the world finds itself sometimes under this necessity, and, if Aristotle did so, and was thereby technically inconsistent with himself, it is no wonder, and involves no serious blame upon him.
But the other hypothesis, that God is a person, means that Aristotle committed a contradiction, not merely in words, but in thought, and not merely as regards some unimportant detail, but as regards the central thesis of his system. It means that he stultified himself by making his conception of God absolutely contradict the essentials of his system. For what is the whole of Aristotle's philosophy, put in a nutshell? It is that the Absolute is the universal, but that the universal does not exist apart from the particular. Plato supplied the thought of the first clause of the sentence. Aristotle added the last clause, and it is the essential of his philosophy. To assert that God, the absolute form, exists as an individual, is flatly to contradict this. It is not likely that Aristotle should have contradicted himself in so vital a matter, and in a manner which simply means that his system falls to the ground like a house of cards.
My conclusion, then, is that it was not Aristotle's intention that what he calls God should be regarded as a person. God is thought, but not subjective thought. He is not thought existent in a mind, but objective thought, real on its own account, apart from any mind which thinks it, like Plato's Ideas. But Plato's mistake was to suppose that because thought is real and objective, it must exist. Aristotle avoids this error. The absolute thought is the absolutely real. But it does not exist. With the concept of God the metaphysics of Aristotle closes.
4. Physics, or the Philosophy of Nature.