This essay is about motion. We commonly think of motion as the subject of
the science of physics. It is a category which apparently refers to bodies and
their spatial locomotions. We have come to accept Newton’s three laws of
motion and his stipulation that motion is a simple category well known to
all. However, for those philosophers and theologians prior to the scientific
revolution of the seventeenth century, motion tends to be presented as a
more mysterious category which is not confined to spatial or local motion.
Rather, it may apply to moral as well as physical movements: learning,
growing, ripening and thinking count as motion, just as much as the movement
of bodies through space. The cosmos is seen as saturated with motions
of many kinds, and this apparently renders nature difficult to grasp: natural
beings continuously move in their various ways. What causes motion? Why
do things move? When I throw a ball into the air, what preserves it in
motion after it has left my hand? Is motion orientated towards a particular
goal? Are there different qualities of motion? Meanwhile, within the traditions
of apophatic theology, God is frequently understood negatively as
beyond all qualifications of motion. The divine reality is the first unmoved
mover, the impassible and ineffable source of all created, moving being. So
in addition to questions concerning the nature and purpose of motion which
have concerned philosophers and scientists for centuries, a central theological
question arises: what is the relation between a universe whose very
nature is, to paraphrase Aristotle, a principle of motion and rest, and God
who is wholly beyond motion?