Thomism and the Aseity Fork: Why Pure Act Does Not Escape the No-Beyond Theorem

This paper asks whether Thomism supplies a genuine route beyond the Aseity Fork. A serious test of the Fork must grant the central Thomist commitments: God is not a being within a genus, not spatially outside the created order, not a composite deliberator, not a member of a larger set, and not subject to a Platonic framework standing over against him. The question is whether those commitments alter the Fork or only change the idiom in which one of its horns is occupied. Once Thomism is asked to explain determinate creation—this order rather than another or none—its own machinery generates the same specificity pressure the Fork tracks. Pure act excludes passive potency in God, but does not by itself explain why this determinate created order obtains. Participation invokes a structured order of source, reception, limitation, and difference. Existential causality avoids crude efficient-causal pictures, but not the burden of explaining this creaturely order rather than merely “that something exists.” Analogy regulates predication, but does not erase extensional differences between creating and not creating, this world and another, answered and unanswered prayer. Divine simplicity and timeless decree remove temporal sequence and internal composition, but not the question of determinate content. Extrinsic denomination preserves divine immutability only by shifting specificity to the effect-side. The result is a Thomism-specific closure: if the whole contrast-fixing order is identical with God, the Identity horn follows; if it is non-identical with God, dependence follows. Attempts to avoid both horns leave specificity brute or surrender determinate doctrinal content. Thomism changes the idiom in which the Fork is occupied; it does not escape it.