Aristotle's view of an impassive God

This is complicated to grasp for me, as I am not religious at all (if we stick to the definition of religion in which the worshipping of a deity is implied). I remember hearing about this back in high school, during philosophy class.

I will say this: it is harder for me to consider the existence of an all-loving God than that of an indifferent one. In this way, my opinion aligns with Aristotle's. I think it sensible, and logical, to imagine that God (if God there be) is an all-powerful entity that simply chooses to stay still and let human matters run their course.

However, I can't get behind the idea that this stems from a state of perfection; that God would be a being of such completion that they merely wouldn't strive to give love, and wouldn't need to reach towards us as we reach towards them. If God is indifferent to us, if they let things happen, good and bad, I would surmise it's because it is their way of loving (whatever that means). Or their way of making sure that we continue to be human. They would be loving, but not in the way that we define the verb. If there is a God, they must be above our perception of morals and ethics, of fairness and justice. But that is not to say they would be perfect, on the contrary. In a way, I agree with Aristotle, but I am just unsure about his point regarding perfection and fulfillment.

If God is an indifferent being, then I think we should infer from this that they are also actively choosing indifference, hence meaning that they are not unmoving nor unmovable. And thus imperfect.

I don't know if this makes any sense but anyways. I could probably have written a better answer if I could see your prompt while typing but I can't, so I might've remembered some of it poorly or skipped over some stuff, sorry.

It's an okay-ish explanation of Aristotle's view of a necessary, perfect God, but (obviously) the Scholastic world did not many view many reasons to depart from Aristotle's view of God. St. Thomas Aquinas' only major departures with Aristotle as a whole is the past as infinite, the peripatetic idea that the Divine is the Final End of reality (but not the First Cause), and that one can be satisfied with a finite life with finite goodness. The interpretation of the agent intellect or as technical as the interpretation of the term ousia is contentious amongst Thomists though, admittedly.

Anyway, I would say their key differences are for sure ethics, and metaphysics (or even epistemology) Aristotle didn't perceive a distinction between existence and essence since he didn't require a space between an articulation of what a thing is and that thing's existing. Thomas Aquinas, on the other hand, followed Avicenna (debatable to which extent) and argued for a distinction between a thing's essence from its existence. Nevertheless he reads this tradition, the Pagan Aristotelian tradition, alongside the Abrahamic, the tradition of Neoplatonism, then Augustinianism, then of classical Islamic philosophy, and which was continued as the dominant context of the scholasticism to which Aquinas belonged.

My point is (I'm very tired) is that Aquinas, alongside other thinkers like Francisco de Vitoria, Giles of Rome, John of Saint Thomas, Reginald of Piperno, Thomas Cajetan, (or even the Aristotelizing philosophers such as Alexander of Aphrodisias, Maimonides, Averroes) are sufficiently Aristotelian. Their view of God, alongside being Christian, (or Abrahamic) are nevertheless Aristotelian.