C. How there is Equality and Inequality in the One act of God’s Love

19. The third point [n.6] is plain, because the will by which God loves is one power and its first object is one; and it has a single infinite act equal to itself. Nor is it necessary that this one act include everything, as if everything were required for the perfection of the act. All that follows from the perfection of the act is that the act tend perfectly to the first term, and also tend to everything of which the first term is the total reason for acting. But in the case of both the divine intellect and the divine will the divine essence alone is able to be the first reason for acting; because if something else could be the first reason the power would be cheapened.

20. From this it is plain that, when we compare the act with the agent, there is no inequality in God in his love of everything.

21. But if we compare the act to what it connotes, or to the things it ranges over, there is inequality - not only because the things willed are unequal or because unequal goods are willed, but also because the act ranges over them according to a certain order. For everyone who wills rationally wills first the end, and immediately second what attains the end, and third the other things that are more remotely ordained for attaining the end. Thus does God also most reasonably will them, although not in diverse acts but in a single one, insofar as he tends to ordered objects in diverse ways: First, he wills the end, and herein his act is perfect and his intellect perfect and his will blessed. Second, he wills things that are immediately ordered to himself, namely by predestining the elect (who attain to him immediately), and this as by a sort of reflection, when he wills others to love the same object as himself (as was said earlier about charity, 3 d.28 nn.14-15). For, first, he loves himself in ordered way (and so not in disordered way by being jealous or envious). Second, he wants to have others as his joint lovers, and this is his willing others to have his own love in them - and this is to predestine them, if we supposw he wants them to have this sort of good finally and eternally. And, third, he wants the things that are necessary for attaining this end, namely the goods of grace. Fourth, because of these goods, he wants other goods that are more removed, namely this sensible world in which others may serve him, so that in this way what is said in Physics 2.2.194a34-35might be true, namely that “man is in some way the end of all things,” of all sensible things that is, for it is because of the world willed by God in the second moment, as it were, that all sensible things are willed in the fourth moment, as it were. Also, that which is closer to the ultimate end is accustomed to be called the end of those that are more remote [I d.41 n.41]. Man, then, will be the end of the sensible world, either because God wills the sensible world in view of predestined man, or because he more immediately wills man to love him than he wills the sensible world to exist.

22. And thus is it plain that the inequality of the things he wills (as far as concerns the willed things) is not a matter of the volition of him who wills but because his volition ranges over the objects in the way stated. But this inequality in the act is because of the goodness that is presupposed in all objects other than God, which goodness is as it were the reason that they are to be willed in this way or in that. But this reason is in the divine will alone. For it is because the divine will accepts certain things to such or such a degree that they are good in such or such a degree, and not conversely. Or if it be granted that there is in them, as things shown [to the will] by the intellect, some degree of essential goodness according to which they ought rationally to please the will in ordered way, then at any rate this is certain, that the fact they are well pleasing to God, as to their actual existence, is simply from the divine will without any determining reason on their part.