DIVINE POWER. - It is one of the divine attributes, which also goes under the name of omnipotence.

Power is the faculty of receiving or of doing something; as passive capacity, power is opposed to act as the perfectible is to perfection. But as active capacity, power is the faculty of producing an effect, of realizing. Evidently power cannot be attributed to God in the first sense, because God is pure act, but it certainly belongs to God in the sense of a realizing force proportionate to pure actuality.

According to a well-known principle of Thomistic philosophy, a being is all the more capable of acting the more it is in act, and therefore God, who is pure act, has an infinite capacity for action, that is, is omnipotent. Divine omnipotence is vividly exalted throughout Sacred Scripture and in tradition; the magisterium of the Church has made it an article of faith in its Creed and in its definitions (cf. Vatican Council, sess. III, chap. 1: Denz-U, 1782).

In every divine action, knowledge, will and omnipotence concur in distinct ways: knowledge as directive, will as command, omnipotence as realizing force. By virtue of omnipotence, God can do everything that he wills and that, consequently, does not imply a metaphysical repugnance. Evil and sin, for example, being rather non-beings, cannot be the effect of the First Cause, which is a being in an absolute sense.

The Scholastics are accustomed to distinguish in God an absolute power and an ordained power; the first prescinds from the other attributes, the second, on the other hand, is always considered in harmony with the other divine properties and especially with goodness and wisdom. Thus God, according to absolute power, could annihilate souls, which by nature are immortal, but according to ordained power he preserves them. Generally, ordained power takes into account the structure and the laws or conditions of nature as it has been realized with creation (cf. St. Thomas, Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 25; C. Gent., I, 16; II, cc. 7-10). v. ATTRIBUTI DIVINI.

Bibliography3 works

BIBL.: L. Lessius, De perfectionibus moribioque divinis, Paris 1881; R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Le divine perfectioni secondo la dottrina di s. Tommaso, Rome 1923; M. Daffara, De Deo Uno et Trino, Turin 1945, pp. 299-302.

Pietro Parente

@incollection{ec9_potenza_divina, author = {Parente, Pietro}, title = {Potenza Divina}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IX}, pages = {1848--1849}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1952}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/potenza-divina} }

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Divine Power

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