Daily Inspiration Quote by Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas is doing something quietly radical here: protecting God from the categories that make everything else graspable. In medieval scholastic terms, “individual substance” is the basic unit of reality - a particular thing with its own boundaries. But Aquinas insists that what makes things “this one, not that one” is matter. Matter parcels existence into countable instances: this horse, that tree, you, me. So if God were an “individual” in that same sense, God would be one item among items, a super-being sitting on the shelf next to the rest of creation.

The move is both metaphysical and polemical. Aquinas is pushing back against a naive mental picture of God as a cosmic person with a body, a location, and a private allotment of being. Calling God “an individual substance” sounds reverent, but it smuggles in creaturely limitations: if individuated like us, God could in principle be compared, divided, measured, or multiplied. Aquinas’ God can’t be one specimen in a genus, because that would make “godhood” a kind of nature shared with other possible gods. Monotheism, in his system, isn’t just a headcount; it’s a refusal of the whole framework that makes headcounts possible.

Context matters: Aquinas is translating Christian theology into Aristotle’s vocabulary, then bending that vocabulary until it can’t reduce God to a thing. The subtext is a warning to language itself: the closer you get to precision about God, the more you must unlearn the habits of ordinary description.