Aquinas’s Fourth Way of Demonstrating God’s Existence: From Virtual Quantum Gradations of Perfection (Inequality in Beauty) of Forms Existing within a Real Genus

Abstract

Of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Five Ways of demonstrating God’s existence in his famous Summa Theologiae, the one that often strikes many contemporary readers as most puzzling is his Fourth Way, which, in the first sentence, he says he takes from “gradations that are discovered in things.” By gradations discovered in things, in his second sentence, Thomas gives us an example of what his first sentence means: “[M]ore or less are said of different beings according to the way they resemble in different ways something that maximally exists, just as the hotter more resembles the maximally hot.” In his third sentence, taking the liberty to paraphrase St. Thomas, he claims that, similar to the case of discovering unequal intensities of