Pure act. God as fully realized actuality with no potentiality whatever. It answers a real problem, and it makes receptivity a defect in the highest being, which makes it a defect everywhere below.
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In scholastic theology actus purus names God as absolute actuality: ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, fully realized, containing no potential awaiting actualization, because a potential unrealized would be a perfection lacking, and a perfection lacking is not God.
The argument that produces it is not frivolous and this entry does not treat it as such. To change is to be actualized, so change presupposes something already in act. If that actuality is itself mixed with potentiality it presupposes another, and the regress ends only in something purely actual. Aquinas is answering a genuine question about what actualizes the actualizer, and the answer is coherent.
What it costs is receptivity, and the cost is paid at the top and then charged downward.
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IF POTENTIALITY IS IMPERFECTION
Follow the consequence rather than the argument.
If God contains no potentiality, then potentiality is what distinguishes the creature from God, and it is the mark of the creature's lesser standing. To be able to receive is to be incomplete. To undergo is to be acted upon by something more actual than oneself, and to be acted upon is to occupy the lower position in the transaction.
So acting ranks above undergoing, and it ranks above it not as a matter of preference but as a matter of proximity to the divine. The active is the more real. A doctrine of God in which receiving is the deficiency has installed a hierarchy before any question about creatures has been asked, and every later ranking of the doing over the undergoing arrives already licensed.
[See THE FOUR AXES · QUALITY]
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BÖHME PUTS THE POTENTIAL IN GOD
The Ungrund is the exact inverse, and Böhme knew what he was inverting.
It is the groundless, prior to all distinction, neither light nor dark and neither good nor evil, and it is characterized precisely by what actus purus excludes: potentiality determined by nothing. In it the wills strive towards manifestation. Böhme's own account runs two of them, the Begierde, the astringent craving that is an infinite multiplicity of unrealized wills, and the free will that flows through it and brings it to order.
Which means that in this cosmology the unrealized is not a defect in God but the condition of anything occurring at all. The dark ground is in God. The capacity to receive is not what separates the creature from the divine. It is what the divine is made of before anything has been made.
Ernest Koenker's Potentiality in God: Grund and Ungrund in Jacob Boehme is the direct treatment of the collision, and the collision is not a footnote to Böhme's account. It is the point at which he departs from the scholastic account and takes four centuries of subsequent thought with him.
[See THE SEVEN QUALITIES · THE YIELDING · THE FIERCE BIRTH]
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IT MAKES THE CROSSING UNINTELLIGIBLE
The consequence that matters most here is not political.
The whole sequence this work turns on is a yielding. The Harshness sinks down as it were dead. The fire meets what has softened and becomes what it encountered. The creature does not achieve the crossing and cannot force it. She receives it, and the receiving is the thing.
Under actus purus that sequence cannot be read as ascent. Yielding is the movement from act towards potency, which is the direction of diminishment, and a creature who softens has become less like God rather than more. The tradition that holds the crossing has to make it mean something, and what it can make it mean is submission to an authority above, which is a transaction between an actor and a recipient and not a yielding at all. A cosmology in which pure act is the perfection cannot render the fire's opening as anything but a fall, so it renders the whole passage as obedience instead.
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AND IT MAKES THE TRANSLATIONS INEVITABLE
This is why the entry is cited where it is cited.
The recoveries turn on two words. Teshuqah rendered as desire rather than turning: a turning is a receptive orientation, while a desire is an appetite that requires governing. Kephalē rendered as head rather than source: a source gives rise to and is in relation with what comes from it, while a head commands what is beneath it. In both cases the rendering chosen is the one that converts a receptive relation into a hierarchy of act over recipient.
Those are not two unrelated errors by two sets of translators. They are what a translator produces when the doctrine of God he holds makes receptivity the lesser condition, because the receptive reading will keep looking to him like the theologically weaker one and the hierarchical reading like the sound one.
Which means the corrections cannot be secured at the level of the words. Recover teshuqah and kephalē against a God who is pure act, and the doctrine will reproduce the readings, because it will keep supplying the intuition that receiving is the inferior thing and that a text describing it must be describing subordination.
[See TRANSLATION CORRUPTIONS · TESHUQAH · KEPHALE]
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A GOD WHO CANNOT BE MET
The last consequence is the one this tradition exists on.
Encounter is two-directional. Something arrives, and something in the one it arrives at receives it, and what happens between them is not the operation of the first upon the second. A being that is pure act does not receive. He acts, and what he acts upon undergoes, and the relation is asymmetrical at every point and in every instance, permanently.
So direct encounter with such a being is not available in the sense this tradition means. What is available is instruction, command, and the reception of effects, all of which can be administered, which is to say all of which can be transmitted through an office. A God who cannot be met needs an institution to represent him, and a God who can be met does not, and the whole of the difference between the mediated tradition and the direct-encounter one sits in a thirteenth-century answer to a question about regress.
[See DIRECT ENCOUNTER · CONVINCEMENT · THE ESTABLISHMENT]
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Aquinas was answering what actualizes the actualizer, and his answer holds against the question he asked.
What it also does is decide, before any creature is discussed, that to receive is to fall short. And that decision is still running: in the ranking of the active over the receptive, in the readings of the two words, in the account of the crossing as obedience, and in the necessity of an office standing between a creature and a being who has no capacity to meet her.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
