Breviloquium

Concerning the omnipotence of God, these things are to be held according to sacred doctrine: that God is omnipotent, yet so that culpable acts are not attributed to him, as to lie and to will evil; nor penal acts, as to fear and to grieve; nor corporeal or material acts, as to sleep and to walk, unless perchance transferentially; nor unfitting acts, as to be able to make one greater than himself, or another God equal to himself, or one infinite in act, and the like: "because, as Anselm says,¹ whatever is unfitting, even the least, is impossible with God." But although he cannot do these, yet he is omnipotent truly, properly and perfectly.

The understanding and reason of the aforesaid is this: because the first principle is powerful with a power that is power simply; and therefore the distribution added to it distributes for those things for which to be able is to be able simply.² But these are things that go forth from complete and ordered power. — But I call complete the power that cannot fail nor succumb nor be in need. But power fails in sinning, succumbs in suffering, includes neediness in corporeal actions. But divine power, because it is highest and most perfect power, therefore is neither from nothing nor under anything nor needs anything else, and thereby can do neither culpable nor penal nor material things; and this, because as omnipotent it is complete power.

But ordered power can be said in three ways: either according to act, or according to aptitude on the part of the creature, or according to aptitude on the part of uncreated virtue alone.³ What is possible to power said in the first way is not only possible but also actual; what in the second way and not the first is possible simply, though not actual; but what in the third way, not the first or second, is possible to God but impossible to the creature. But what is possible in none of the aforesaid ways, as that which directly contradicts order according to the primordial and eternal reasons and causes⁴ is simply impossible: as that God make something infinite in act, that he at once make something be and in no way be, that he make what was, not to have been, and other such things; to be able to do which is against the order and complement of divine power. — From this it is clear with respect to what divine power holds; it is also clear what must be called simply possible, and what simply impossible, and that the impossibility of some things stands together with true omnipotence.