Notes from Dewan's text

Form as something divine..

p. 12
T.A. is not innovating, then, with his teaching that form is something divine in things. ARistotle was there before him. We read in Thomas's paraphrasing commentary:

... form is something divine and best, an object of appetite. It is divine, because every form is something of a participation by likeness of hte divine act of being (divini esse), which (divine act of being) is pure act: for, each thing just to this extent is actually (est in actu), that is, inasmuch as it has form. IT is something best, because act is the perfection of potency and its good; and consequently it follows that it is an object of appetite, because each thing has appetite for its own perfection (ftnt 9).

p. 24
Aristotle carefully distinguishes betw. the level of actuality which we generally call "being," and the level we call "operation".

(...)
The principle fo the living thing as a whole is the soul. It is hwat makes the whole thing unqualifiedly "one". It is the
(p. 25)
principle of being. It is thus a cause in the mode of "form". (ftnt 51) This doctrine is at one with the carefully worked out conception of substantial form in material substances, presented by Aristotle in Metaphysics 7 and 8; the form we encounter there is not the entire esence of the thing, though it is the principle of hte essence. THe essence, signified by the definition, i s a composite of form and matter, taken universally. In other words, the form, though a principle of intelligibility, is here necssarily understood as the perfection of matter. This pertains to the doctrine of the being htat belongs to generable and corruptible things. It is here that Aristotle improves on Plato, the Plato of hte Itimaeus, as we shall see next (...)