Questioning Being The Logic of Ontologic PDF

Rikard Dahl
QUESTIONING BEING
The logic of ontological difference in Aquinas’ God/Being theory
I
Table of Contents
1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1
2 Method, structure and approach .................................................................................... 8
3 Further determination of “the question of Being itself” .............................................. 10
3.1 Ontological difference in Martin Heidegger ......................................................................................... 10
3.2 “Being as such and as a whole” in Lorenz Puntel .............................................................................. 13
3.3 Situating the ontological difference in a Thomist framework ................................................................ 15
4 Components of Aquinas’ theory: actuality/potentiality and Being/essence ............... 17
5 Aquinas’ God/Being theory .......................................................................................... 19
5.1 The logical development of natural theology from prime mover to Being itself........................................ 19
5.1.1 Prima via: deducing the existence of a first cause of Being ........................................................... 19
5.1.2 Ascending the way of remotion in Summa Contra Gentiles ........................................................ 21
5.2 Summit of Being: the transcendence and aseity of Being itself .............................................................. 22
5.3 Ground of Being (and grounded beings): immanence through participational mediation ....................... 24
5.3.1 The participation of beings in the ground of universal perfection................................................... 24
5.3.2 The analogy of Being: semantics of participation ......................................................................... 27
6 Conclusion: how Aquinas’ God makes all the (ontological) difference ....................... 31
II
Abbreviations
Thomas Aquinas
ST Summa Theologiae
The Latin text is from the Leonine Edition and the
English translation is the Benziger Bros. edition,
translated by Fathers of the English Dominican
Province, is taken from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/summa/FP.html
(retrieved 2016-04-14)
SCG Summa Contra Gentiles
The Latin text is from the Leonine Edition, and the
English translation by Anton C. Pegis is taken from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/ContraGentiles.htm
De Ver Questiones Disputatae de Veritate
English translation by Robert W. Mulligan, S.J is taken
from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer.htm
De Pot Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei
English translation the Fathers of the English
Dominican Province is taken from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdePotentia.htm
Martin Heidegger
BT Being and time
Heidegger, Martin, Sein und Zeit. English Being and time ;:
a translation of Sein und Zeit; translated by Joan
Stambaugh, Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 1996.
III
1 Introduction
“Is this what is the most original: the agapeic power to be, or give to be? But relative to finite being, origin
as original can seem to be no-thing. We find ourselves in the fore-ground of the gift of being at all. We come
to ask: What is being given to be at all? What is the original of coming to be that does not itself come to be
but, as giving to be, makes coming to be possible and actual?”1
“The divine substance is being itself, and from it comes being.”2’
In one of his sed contra replies in the Summa Theologiae3, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) quotes the
Hebrew bible with the words of God to Moses at Mt Sinai: Ego sum qui sum—in the words of the
Latin vulgate—I am Who/that I am. This saying is interpreted philosophically in two ways by the
angelic doctor; in ST, the words are speaking of the existence of God that is to be demonstrated
according to the famous five ways; but in the Summa Contra Gentiles, this quote is used in a slightly
different setting under the chapter heading titled “That in God being and essence are the same”.4
This chapter is not concerned with a so-called proof of God’s existence but is rather trying to
explain what the phrase “God exists” really means. Here Thomas could be seen as arguing that,
to think God’s existence, we can not proceed with the assumption that we already know what
existence means before we know what God means, and whether God exists; rather, according to
Thomas’, God is existence itself, and so it is existence that is derivative of God, not the other way
around. What Aquinas did was to let Being—or esse, the present infinitive of the sum in the
quotation above—become the “controlling notion” for his thinking about God5. In fact, for
Thomas, God and Being are identical, and so his existentialist metaphysic of God amounts to a
theological metaphysic of existence—or, to use the more correct term6, of Being.
1
Desmond, William, God and the between, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.
2
This is Aquinas quoting Boethius, taken from SCG I, c.22, 11.
3
ST I, q. 2, a. 3.
4
SCG I, 22.
5
One way of interpreting Aquinas’ use of Being as a theological concept is in terms of Barry Miller’s concept of a
controlling notion. In discussing how different theologians have made use of different central concepts that serve as
a yardstick for theological reflection—God as ‘Perfect being’ for Anselmians, God as ‘One’ for those inspired by
Neoplatonism, such as Maimonides—Miller attributes the idea of God as Subsistent Being to Aquinas as his
controlling notion. This view is in accord with the interpretation of Aquinas that the present thesis seeks to present.
Cf. Miller, Barry, A most unlikely God: a philosophical enquiry into the nature of God, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1996, 1-14.
6
There are many different reasons for translating Aquinas’ latin infinitive esse with Being instead of the noun
existence: the words have very different etymological roots, substituting Being with existence can change the
inherent dynamic in the meaning of the former to that of a merely abstract property, and it is continuous with the
longer philosophical history of thinking about Being, where the understanding of the latter is bound up with and
1
This thesis will argue that the account of St. Thomas that is summarized above, amounts to an
answer to the question of Being—a perennial philosophical problematic whose formulation will be
explained shortly. This answer is a synthesis of two answers: to the philosophical question of
Being on the one hand, and to the theological question of God on the other. In the following we
will take our cues from these two “inter-disciplinary” aspects of Aquinas’ thought, and attempt to
show how they interrelate and inform each other, as well as how their union constitute an answer
to the question of Being. We will begin by first determining the “question of Being” more
specifically and then present Aquinas’ answer in a systematic way. The emphasis will be on the
structural elements in the latter’s thought that can be clearly correlated to the guiding question; as
we will see, this will involve an account of how Aquinas natural theology deduces the existence
and attributes of transcendent God/Being itself, from the starting point of the being of beings;
and how beings are envisioned as grounded in the Being of God so that the latter is immanent to
beings according to a system of metaphysical participation.
What then, is this “question of Being?” The expression is taken from Martin Heidegger (1889-
1976)— die Frage nach dem Sein— and serves as his mission statement in the beginning of Being and
time.7 Heidegger can there be seen as distinguishing between two different questions of Being,
whose linguistic particularities are taken as expressive of the philosophical issues that he is
seeking to thematize. The first of these could be rendered as the question of being (Seiendes), and
is quickly put to the side by Heidegger for the sake of the next question, the question of Being
(Sein). This is a question that Heidegger takes as representing a fundamental philosophical
problematic, and one that has been largely lost through the course of the history of Western
philosophy. While not sharing his view of this history—but probably sharing some of his basic
intuition regarding this question—we will appropriate the underlying distinction that Heidegger
makes here, and attempt both to reformulate his question, and to present answer to it. We will
reformulate the question so that it is formulated as “the question of Being itself” or
complementarily “of Being as such”; and we will argue that this question can be meaningfully
posed to, and receives an abiding answer from, what we will call Thomas Aquinas’ God/Being
theory. This question may or may not coincide with Heidegger's original understanding of his
derived from its different uses as a verb; therefore we will primarily use Being instead of existence, except where the
meanings overlap sufficiently, or as we did here, to provisionally introduce the idea. As is common, instead of
rendering Aquinas’ esse or Heidegger’s Sein as “to be”, we will also distinguish between the capital “Being” for the
infinitive form of the verb, and the lowercase “being” for the participle. For a more detailed discussion of the
philosophico-linguistic difficulties of the word Being, see Section 3.1. For a discussion of the differences between
scholars of Aquinas regarding the translation of esse, see Colledge, R. (2008). “On ex(s)istere: re-visiting the to-be –
to-exist debate.” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, 82, 263–274.
7
Heidegger’s two questions of being/Being are discussed in Section 3.1.
2
second question in BT8, but our objective will not be to reproduce his argument; rather, we will
take our cue from the exigency perceived by Heidegger, and we will argue according to our
specific understanding of the question.
Now, in the interest of clarity we should probably attempt a tentative explanation of this question
already at this point, although with a strong emphasis on the following three caveats: firstly, in so
far as Being is—as traditionally understood—what gives essences their very concretization and
actualization, there is the very real danger of essentializing Being by attempting to formulate—or
put into form, where form can be seen to be cognate with morphé, the Aristotelian word for
essence—it and force it into abstraction; in contrast to the post-Aquinian medieval tradition that
tended to do this more and more, the earlier tradition understood the term Being as more
concrete and dynamic. We will attempt to resist this temptation to some degree, by giving some
preliminary determinations at this point, and let the fuller content of the term, as we will
understand it, be shown during the course of our treatment of Aquinas. Secondly, we do not
understand our formulation of the question as constituting anything original: for the purposes of
this thesis and its argumentative requirements we will specify our inquiry in a particular way, but
this should not be seen as discontinuous with the way the question has been posed—in various
guises—throughout the history of philosophy.9 Thirdly, if this question of Being should seem
vague and undetermined even after the following exposition, we can promise a progressive
increase in clarity and further determination in Section 3.
The first thing to say is that this question, is more like a line of questioning, a certain project of
inquiry, rather than a fully determinate, univocal, and singular question. Nevertheless we will
propose to take it as sufficiently determinate to distinguish it from other questions of being—a
species of questions whose philosophical pedigree will be discussed shortly. Our question of
Being represents an attempt to think what Being is in itself. While the question in its phrasing
8
Similarly, we are not arguing that our understanding of the question coincides with the later Heidegger, inasmuch
as he shifted emphasis in later works from the concept of ontological difference as a criterion of the question. Cf.
Caputo, John D., Heidegger and Aquinas: an essay on overcoming metaphysics, New York: Fordham University Press, 1982,
1-12 et passim.
9
Indeed, while the subsequent paragraphs will attempt to delineate our question of Being itself from other questions
of being, we hold that all these question belong to the same ”species” of questions. This seems to be the
understanding of Heidegger as well, who saw continuity between his version of the question of Being and the
ancient Greek versions, for instance. in BT, Heidegger writes that, ”If we may allude to earlier and in their own right
altogether incomparable researches on the analysis of being, then we should compare the ontological sections in
Plato's Parmenides or the fourth chapter of the seventh book of Aristotle's Metaphysics with a narrative passage
from Thucydides. Then we can see the stunning character of the formulations with which their philosophers
challenged the Greeks. Since our powers are essentially inferior, and also since the area of being to be disclosed
ontologically is far more difficult than that presented to the Greeks, the complexity of our concept-formation and
the severity of our expression will increase.” Cf. BT, 34.
3
does not determine what Being is, whether it is an abstract property that can be translated by the
analytic philosopher into the logical notation of an existential quantifier, or whether it is the
mysterious ground of reality that defies intelligibility—to give, at the same time, both two lines of
inquiry and two conclusions to it—is not per se included in the question. Nevertheless, as already
indicated, we are reminiscent of the fact that ancient thinkers tended to attribute a more concrete
understanding to it than modern ones; a fact which is important because our formulation of the
question is an attempt to capture something of a perennial philosophical problematic. Now,
because Being is not here conceived in the abstract, we have chosen not to phrase the question as
one of “existence”, seeing as this noun does not carry the same connotations and the same
philosophico-linguistic history as the verb Being. This question certainly involves an inquiry into
what existence is, that it is, and how it is; but for present purposes we have chosen to pose the
question with—what arguably can be said to be—a broader sweep. Moreover, our question is of
Being “as such,” or “in itself,” but Being is never encountered or experienced as such, but only in
(composition with) the multitude of things that have Being. Hence, an inquiry into Being itself
will always imply an inquiry into the beings that have Being as well. This is not to say that we will
not attempt in the following to only consider Being itself, or as such; but we will have to do this
in the context of a reciprocally illustrative consideration of beings.
Now, this question represents a profound challenge to philosophical thought and is fraught with
controversy: for example, the analytic philosophers already hinted at—those that adhere to the
Frege-Russell-Quine understanding of existence10—would perhaps dismiss our question as a
pseudo-question, insisting that it is an illegitimate reification of a concept that generates muddled
metaphysical thinking; a revivification of Platonic forms that has no basis in empirical reality11.
And, while the question of Being as such is historically connected with theology, theologians and
philosophers of religion too have differed enormously in their appreciation of the asking of this
question on their turf: some insisting that God can not be imprisoned in the category of Being,
holding that the result of this would be a religiously vacous or even idolatrous “God of the
philosophers”12; others maintain that there is needed a metaphysical reflection precisely on the
10
Which is that existence is not a real property that can be coherently converted to logical notation, and is thus an
“empty” concept. This view, broadly speaking, could be seen to have its predecessor in Kant’s argument of the
hundred possible and the hundred actual thalers in the first Critique.
11
For a discussion of contemporary analytic philosophers’ approaches to existence in similar contexts, see Kremer,
Elmar J. Analysis of existing : Barry Miller's approach to God, New York; London: Bloomsbury, 2014; and, Vallicella,
William F. A paradigm theory of existence : onto-theology vindicated , Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 2002.
12
The paradigmatic example is of course Karl Barth who considered the doctrine of the analogia entis as ”the
invention of the Antichrist”; and were therefore hostile to the project of natural theology, which in its scholastic
forms hinge on predications of Being with respect to God; for an example of a Catholic philosopher/theologian that
4
category of Being, as a praeambula fidei if theology is to be rationally justified at all13; that the
identification of God with Being is imperative to the theological enterprise14. Taking the difficulty
of articulating the question that we are seeking—and the difficulties raised by philosophers and
theologians alike—into account, what is needed at this point is probably a bit of
contextualization. To introduce this question of Being then, we will proceed indirectly by
situating it in the history of philosophy: this will be done briefly and in a very simple way in the
following introductory remarks.
First of all then, before the question of Being itself, there were other questions of being. This
species of questions had its genesis as a properly philosophical inquiry, arguably, roughly
contemporaneously with the genesis of philosophy itself—i.e. with the Presocratics15. That is not
to say that the all of the Presocratics always construed these questions in the metaphysically
proper sense—they may or may not have in particular instances—but that a certain kind of
questioning about the world in its most fundamental aspects and as a whole, was inaugurated.
This led, within a period of about a hundred years, further into the kind of questioning of being
that we find in Plato and Aristotle, both of which are very much a part of philosophical
discussion in our time. Thus the Presocratic inquiry which Aristotle took to be into the physical
principles of all being (arché einai panton)16, became more explicitly metaphysical with the challenge
of Parmenides to see being as one and unchanging; this became the heritage of such a one as
Plato, who, with his theory of the division of being into the ideal and the sensible realms17 has
informed—his critics would probably say haunted—philosophy ever since. Thus Aristotle,
building on and reacting to his teacher Plato’s doctrines, would formulate the classical definition
has critcized the doctrine, see Marion, Jean-Luc, God without being: hors-texte, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991.
13
For an excellent discussion of this view and the historical opposition to it, see McInerny, Ralph M, Praeambula fidei:
Thomism and the God of the philosophers, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2006.
14
This is probably the mainstream view among Catholic theologians, and so the examples could be any number of
authors, but for a paradigmatic example see Sokolowski, Robert, The God of faith and reason: foundations of Christian
theology, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1995.
15
By distinguishing our question from the Presocratics we are doing something quite the opposite of Heidegger who
thought that these thinkers, unsullied as they were of the later tradition, really was on to a question of Being as such.
Nevertheless it will be easier highlight the differences of the questions in a schematic way and thus we have chosen
this procedure.
16
Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1, 3. Translation by W. D. Ross. Cf. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.1.i.html
(Retrieved 2016-04-14) Note that we have transliterated Aristotle’s infinitive einai into the participle form of the
English being. We take it that this procedure is justified according to the considerations in Section 3.1.
17
It will probably be allowed in this brief historical paragraph to attribute a theory of forms to Plato, as is
conventional, even though Plato himself problematizes this theory in the dialogue named after Parmenides.
5
of metaphysics as the science of being as being18, and so bequeath to his successors in the
medieval period an abiding imperative to think being in terms of its fundamental structures. The
gap here between Aristotle and his medieval heirs is somewhat simplistic; but because much of
the philosophical legacy of antiquity was lost to the West in the destruction of the library of
Alexandria, the metaphysical project of the Western philosophers was in some sense suspended
until the “rediscovery” of Aristotle through the influence of Arabic scholars in the 12th century.
Arguably, it is with these thinkers, Arabic as well as European scholastics, that the question of
Being itself emerged in a form similar to ours. That, in short is the context for why the present
thesis is concerned with Thomas Aquinas.
For posterity, Aquinas has become the scholastic philosopher par excellence: by his synthesis of
Christian theology and Greek Neoplatonist and Aristotelian philosophy, he has come to be seen
as one of the greatest Western philosophers of all time. He was also someone who proposed an
answer to the question of Being which we have in mind: thus we have the first identification of
Being itself and a Christian conception of God19. This is not to say that his proposal was wholly
original: already Augustine (354-430), in his transformation of Neoplatonic thought, identified
the God with Being itself; as did Boethius (480-524), whom Aquinas quotes in the passage
quoted initially in this introduction; as did Avicenna (980-1037), and he in a more systematic way
than the previous figures, such that he could be a great inspiration for Aquinas’ theory of God
and Being. But the present thesis is concerned with the latter, and with the complex of his
thought that we have called the God/Being theory.
Now, while Aquinas’ standing among the philosophers is no doubt monumental, his philosophy
of Being (esse)20 has had a mixed history. For present purposes it should be sufficient to briefly
recall the historical appraisal of Heidegger, who saw the whole problem history (Problemgeschichte)
of medieval metaphysics, including Aquinas, as having entered into an “oblivion of Being”
(Seinsvergessenheit). In the early Heidegger of BT, this criticism is focused upon the neglect of what
18
Aristotle, Metaphysics 4, 1. Here it is important to note that while Aquinas takes up this definition of the science of
metaphysics, he does not see it as a science of ”Being as Being,” but as ”being as being”—the capitalization and the
lowercase represent the infinitive and the participle forms respectively. I.e. while metaphysics for Aristotle includes
theology, it does not for Aquinas; i.e. even though Being as such is treated metaphysically as the first cause of beings,
but not as a proper subject for metaphysics.
19
One account would be to say that Augustine took the Neoplatonic ”One,” which is beyond Being, and united it
conceptually with its emanation, ”The Nous,” so that the Christian God became the intelligent fullness of Being. Cf.
Adams, Marilyn, "What’s Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?", Journal of Analytic Theology, Vol. 2, 2014.
20
Of course, Aquinas responded to many different questions of Being, such as the problems of unity/multiplicity,
permanence/change, etc. But in the present context we have a specific question in mind.
6
Heidegger calls “the ontological difference”21 between Being and beings: by attempting to think
Being in the categories of beings, metaphysicians had obscured, reduced, essentialized, and
thereby forgotten about it. Now, this criticism would prima facie seem to contradict the
“existential” reading of St. Thomas that has been proposed in our introductory paragraph: if
Aquinas made Being, or esse, the controlling notion of his thinking of God, to the point that God
is seen as subsistent Being itself (ipsum esse per se subsistens); if he made all beings ontologically
dependent on Being, to the point of denying them any intrinsic actuality that is not donated by
the self-sufficient divine Being; then, it would rather seem that Aquinas should be extolled for
making the ontological difference absolute, and not for neglecting it. Now Heidegger’s problem
history it is not of central importance for present purposes, even he includes Aquinas in it22,
seeing as we are appropriating, and transposing Heidegger’s question, by using it as an entryway
into, and an approximation of another question shaped by a different prior understanding: and
this is our own question of Being in itself,23. What Heidegger does, is that he provides us with
both an emphasis on the exigency of inquiring about Being, and with an interpretive device for
determining the question, namely the concept of ontological difference, which we will argue
signifies something that is already inherent in Aquinas’ systematic philosophy.
The purpose of this whole preceding historical digression is to provide an initial understanding of
what a question of Being might entail, by giving examples of some of the philosophical contexts
in which such questions have been discussed; and by presenting the specimen of our own inquiry
as both similar and dissimilar to other species and specimina of the family of Being-questions with
varying degrees of approximation to its present formulation; all this has taken us some way
towards contextualizing our specific question of Being.
21
This distinction has often been taken to constitute the core of Heidegger’s criticism of the oblivion of Being. John
Caputo, in his Heidegger and Aquinas argues that Heidegger later came to abandon this distinction and so refine his
critique. This problematic is increased because of the fact that, as Thomas Sheehan has argued, ”[t]here is, in fact,
considerable confusion at the heart of the Heideggerian enterprise”. This confusion extends to the issue of what
really was the core of the different criteria of Heidegger’s critique. Nevertheless, if Caputo is right, it may still be that
Aquinas falls under the critique. But as stated on the next page, the rationale for introducing Heidegger in the
present context, is not that we will try to exonerate Aquinas, but so that we might contextualize and retrieve the
emphasis that we will place on the ”existential” aspects of the latter’s thought, as well as introducing the idea of
”ontological difference” which will serve as one of our main motifs. Cf. Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas; and Sheehan,
Thomas, Making sense of Heidegger: a paradigm shift, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2014, p.5.
22
For an argument to the effect that Aquinas does fall under Heidegger’s criticism, see Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas;
for an argument to the opposite effect, see Lotz, Johannes Baptist, Martin Heidegger und Thomas von Aquin: Mensch, Zeit,
Sein, Freiburg: Herder, 1975. For a contemporary non-Thomistic account that appropriates parts of Thomas’
philosophy of esse but seeks to augment it and defend it from Heidegger’s criticism, see Puntel, Lorenz, Sein und Gott:
ein systematischer Ansatz in Auseinandersetzung mit M. Heidegger, E. Lévinas und J.-L. Marion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck,
2010; this account is discussed specifically in Section 3.2.
23
Specifically, the Heidegger of BT, provides a context for thinking about this problematic, namely in terms of the
ontological difference, which we will makes use of to determine the question of Being in Section 3.
7
At this point, we must attempt to state the objective of the present thesis as clearly as possible,
and for that we return to the angelic doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. For the latter, the existence and
nature of God is surely the capstone and central point of Christian philosophical theology. But as
we have already seen, Aquinas’ way of handling these issues is a synthesis of a metaphysical
philosophy of Being and a theology of God; the complex of which we have called the God/Being
theory. The question that is of present concern then, is simply this: how does Aquinas’ God/Being
theory envision Being itself? More specifically: in the light of the idea of ontological difference, as
expressive of an intuition of/an exigency to/a framework for, the task of thinking of Being itself,
how does Aquinas achieve this? And what are the major characteristics of his approach with
regard to the problematic of the relationship between Being and beings?
In the light of these guiding questions, we will examine the systematicity and coherence of
Aquinas’ God/Being theory: i.e. with regard to the inner logic of its theoretical components, and
with its coherence as a composite whole. With this procedure, we will attempt to show how
Aquinas conceives of Being itself; but, as already mentioned, this will necessarily include a
consideration of beings also; thus we have a dual-aspect investigation ahead of us: firstly, we will
show the absolute distinction between Being and beings; presenting Being as the radically distinct
other of beings; secondly, we will show both how individual beings partake of Being itself
according to a logic of metaphysical participation; and we will present the theoretical framework
that allows Aquinas to bridge radical gap in the middle of the ontological difference: namely his
doctrine of the analogy of Being.
2 Method, structure and approach
Something must also be said of the approach of the thesis, viz. that of framing Aquinas’
philosophy of God and Being as an answer to the question of Being itself. While the present
author hopes that his Ansatz is in some ways relatively original, at least in its execution, neither
the starting point or the conclusion of the thesis should, broadly speaking, be seen as
controversial; but still, the sacrifice of details, and of the multitude of distinctions that Thomas
makes—both are unavoidable sacrifices in a thesis of this brevity—should invite the reader to
examine our Dominican friar more closely for themselves. Aquinas’ views will be presented both
through an exposition of his texts, and by citing and referring to the secondary literature on his
though. At certain points in the account we will take ideas of Aquinas and translate them into
other idioms or frameworks, or interrogate it with questions that may not have concerned
Thomas himself, either with regard to their formulation or their content. At these points we will
8
be quite clear that this is the procedure we are following, and so it should be clear whether we are
claiming to speak from the standpoint of Thomas or some other thinker—or from the
standpoint of the author himself. Regarding the use of Heidegger’s terminology and emphases,
we have tried to make clear that by their invocation, we are not attempting to elaborate the
thought of Heidegger himself, or to reproduce his arguments, but rather that we have
appropriated these as heuristic tools to guide our thought.
To accommodate the brevity of the thesis, we have been very selective as regards the contentual
components of Aquinas’ theories. We have not, for example, engaged with the very basic issues
of the terms Being/being with respect to their role in predication of the categories of being, or
with the distinction between form and matter, substance and accident, and so forth. Neither have
we discussed the many criticisms that could be, and have been, directed towards Aquinas’
thought24, since our purpose is not to defend Aquinas, but to defend our correlation of his theory
to the question of Being, interpreted through the lens of ontological difference. Again: our
purpose is not to assess Thomas’ theory by investigating the soundness of his particular
arguments, but to show, on his own terms, how his account is structured and completed. While it
would surely be important and interesting to extend the scope of this correlation to include the
areas of disagreement as well as of agreement, this has been deemed excessive with regard to the
thesis’ objective.
The structure of the thesis will be as follows:
First, some comments on the ansatz of the thesis is given in Section 2. In Section 3, a further
determination of our question of Being will be attempted by framing the question in terms of
ontological difference. We will examine some of the relevant distinctions that have been made in
this regard in modern philosophy, and provisionally relate these to a Thomist framework.
Section 4 presents a preparatory account of some of the key components that Aquinas utilizes in
unfolding his God/Being theory: the distinctions between act and potency, and between Being
and essence. Section 5 is an exposition of Aquinas’ understanding of God as Subsistent Being.
We will follow a reverse exitus-reditus scheme, and see how Aquinas starts from the being of
beings and traces back the chain of universal causal dependence to the first cause of beings; we
will see how he deduces the negations that must be attributed to this first cause, thereby revealing
both the summit and ground of Being, God/Being itself, as both absolutely distinct from, and yet
absolutely related to, beings; this second aspect of Aquinas’ theory will then be explored as we
24
To take one fitting and prominent example, we could mention Sir Anthony Kenny’s Aquinas on being. Cf. Kenny,
Anthony, Aquinas on being, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
9
descend from God/Being to beings by showing how they participate in the former as their
ground according to an analogical framework. Finally, Section 6 will summarize the endeavor,
draw together its conclusions, and attempt to give an indication of their coherence.
3 Further determination of “the question of Being itself”

“Since then, we are in a difficulty, please to tell us what you mean, when you speak of being; for there can
be no doubt that you always from the first understood your own meaning, whereas we once thought that we
understood you, but now we are in a great strait. Please to begin by explaining this matter to us, and let us
no longer fancy that we understand you, when we entirely misunderstand you.”25
For the present thesis to succeed it is imperative that the point of view from which it is written is
established more determinatively before the contentual account of Aquinas begins. Our research
question is about Aquinas’ proposal for an answer to “the question of Being itself”; it is about
the way in which his theology coincides with his metaphysics, producing a synthesis that we have
labeled his God/Being theory; but even if this synthesis is composed of two parts, we are seeking
to consider it under the aspect of the question of Being itself; and therefore this question will
have to be articulated, difficult as it may be. This difficulty is owing to the relative non-
intuitiveness of thinking of Being itself; and as already intimated we never experience Being itself
but only the multitude of beings that are, the things that exist, that have Being. To approach an
articulation of this question, we will therefore proceed to thematize this difficulty by introducing
a number of distinctions that all attempt to distinguish between Being itself and this multitude of
beings.
3.1 Ontological difference in Martin Heidegger
A leitmotif of the present thesis is that what Martin Heidegger called “the ontological difference,”
is an insightful and succinct way of expressing a distinction that has utility as a heuristic notion in
our interpretation of Aquinas’ God/Being theory. The meaning of ontological difference is the
topic of the following subsection; although the account will be brief, it should allow us to further
clarify our starting point. We will begin with a philosophico-linguistic comment on Heidegger’s
own question of Being.
25
Plato, Sophist, 244a. This translation by Benjamin Jowett is without Stephanus numbers.
Cf. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/sophist.html 244a (retrieved 2016-04-14) This quote is found in the beginning of
Heidegger’s BT, and is used as to frame his retrieval of the question of Being.
10
The distinction that is called ontological difference is indicative of the approach that Heidegger is
taking in BT, when he is first formulating his own question of Being. The standard understanding
of it is that it expresses a distinction between Being and beings and this is how we will ultimately
understand it, but there are several important qualifications to be made with regard to Heidegger
here. The conventional way of phrasing the matter is not entirely correct, both for philosophical
and linguistic reasons26. Heidegger’s distinction is more accurately described in English as one
between “be” and “being”; it is concerned with “the be of being”; it distinguishes the infinite
form of the verb Sein, from the participle form, Seiend. This is conventionally translated into
English by capitalizing the participial gerund form Being, so that it can signify the German
infinitive Sein, and by having the same form in lowercase to signify the German participle Seiend.
The philosophical problematic here is most clearly related to Heidegger’s core project in Being
and time; but the most effective illustration of it might be to advert to his distinguishing of two
questions of being in another text: in “On the question of Being” Heidegger takes the traditional
question of Being to be of “beings as beings”(note the participle form of being—Seienden als
Seienden).27 This is the question that the metaphysical tradition which Heidegger criticizes has
been concerned with according to him; the other question would be about “be as be” (Sein als
Sein)—or with Being as Being—this is the real question of Being for Heidegger and it comes
close to—while not being identical with—the question we have in mind. This question is clearly
about distinguishing between the very “core,” “fact,” or “givenness,” of what it is to be, from the
beings that are. In BT, Heidegger takes the distinction between the objects of these two questions
to constitute the idea of ontological difference28. A consideration of the relationship between the
two; the tension between the attempt to think Being, and the necessity of thinking it in relation to
26
The linguistic difficulties at play here concern the different ways similar concepts relating to Being are expressed in
different languages: the presently most important being the differences between the original Greek phrasings of the
questions of Being; between its Latin forms in the high middle ages; and between modern German and English
forms. But all of these linguistic peculiarities have philosophical implications: the infinitive form of “be,” “sein” (or
“Sein” in the nominalized form), “esse,” “einai,” in English, German, Latin, and Greek respectively, carry a more
abstract meaning, whereas the participles “being,” “seiende,” “ens,” “on,” in the same sequence, carries a more
concrete one. This may reflect different ways of posing the questions of Being/being as the ancients focused more
on the participial sense and moderns more on the infinitive form; again, this means that the different linguistic
conditions of the question can have implications for whether it is conceived as inquiring about an abstract property
or of a concrete commonality. In addition to this, there is the further issue of the way we have rendered the
ontological difference into English—as a difference between Being and being(s)—in which the participial gerund
form Being is capitalized so as to signify something which is more similar to an infinitive form. This is a
conventional way of translating the expression from German to English, but it can be important to note after this
linguistic parenthesis. Cf. Blanchette, Oliva. 1991. “Are There Two Questions of Being?”. The Review of
Metaphysics 45 (2). Philosophy Education Society Inc.: 259–87.
27
Cf. "The question of Being by Martin Heidegger" in Heidegger, Martin, The question of being: Translated with an introd.
by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde, New York: Twayne Publishers, 1958, 33.
28
The phrase itself is only written out in the footnotes of BT, but its meaning constitutes its main thematic.
11
beings; will illustrate the problematic further: “Insofar as Being constitutes what is asked about,
and insofar as Being means the Being of beings, beings themselves turn out to be what is
interrogated in the question of Being.”29 Now, this procedure is partly the one we will perform in
the present context: the objective of the question of Being as such is to get at, or attempt to
think, what Being is in itself; but this has to be done by situating Being in relation to beings. For
Heidegger, consideration leads methodologically to a separation between what he calls the
“ontic” consideration of beings, and the “ontological” consideration of Being. This allows for a
framework to clearly delineate philosophical analysis as it relates either to the near end of the
ontological difference, i.e. to Being, or the far end of the same, i.e. to beings. This terminology
will also be appropriated in the subsequent investigation.
As can be gleaned from his attitude towards the metaphysical tradition, Heidegger had in many
respects a wholly different approach to this question than his predecessors, and also from the
approach that we will follow. For him, the proper methodology of this question is at once
hermeneutic, existential, and phenomenological, and thus he begins his investigation of Being
from the starting point of the human being as “being-there” or Dasein. Thus we can see that if we
apply the distinction—surely simplistic—between the premodern philosophical method which
began from ontology, and the modern, post-Cartesian and post-Kantian methods which begin
from epistemology, it would seem that Heidegger is closer to the latter. But this characterization
of him is surely unfair; in actual fact, Heidegger was seeking a way to escape from, and break
open, the bonds of the subject-object dichotomy, and situate the human person as always, in an
existentiell30 way, engaged with the world around her; thus we have his definition of the human
Dasein as being-in-the-world.
All of this has taken us some way from the topic at hand, but without some mentioning of
Heidegger’s own project, without clearly distinguishing it from our own, as expressed in our
reformulation of his question, there is the risk of radically misrepresenting his main convictions.
Now, we should briefly say something about the philosophical outlook of Aquinas as a contrast
to this. As regards the subject-object dichotomy, this is no problem for Aquinas31 in so far as as
29
BT, 5.
30
A neologism of Heidegger that signifies that the word is used in the ”ontic” sense of pertaining to historical being
in time.
31
That is, he would not think of the problems of the epistemological bridge, of getting from ”in here,” to ”out
there,” as a problem. Whether his cognitional and epistemic theories are still justified and valid in our day, after the
famous turn to the subject is another matter, which will not be assessed here. In so far as mainstream philosophy has
largely discarded Aquinas’ theories on these topics, there is probably not needed any references to criticisms of
Aquinas here, for a modern reworking of Aquinas’ epistemic theories, see Lonergan, Bernard, Insight: a study of human
understanding, New York: Philosophical library, 1958.
12
his gnoseology32 is isomorphic with his ontology; i.e. both the intellect and the sensible faculty of
the subject, and the intelligible and sensible world of objects are united according to the model
“knowledge by identity.” Therefore, being (ens) is not problematic for him as it would be in the
wake of Cartesian skepticism: rather, it is the first thing that the intellect grasps when it comes
into contact with the world33. This, of course, goes some way to explain the different conditions
under which Heidegger and Aquinas respectively approached the question of Being/beings.
We will here limit our discussion of Heidegger’s views to these brief considerations. As
mentioned, our intention is not to reproduce his Heidegger’s argument, and therefore we will
hopefully be excused for appropriating his idea of ontological difference as referring to a
distinction between Being considered in itself, and the beings that have being. While this may or
may not approximate Heidegger’s understanding of the question itself, it is fairly certain that
Aquinas’ account would not agree with the implications that the former drew from it. There can
still be much to say in terms of rehabilitating Aquinas’ from Heidegger’s charges of forgetfulness,
but we will lay this aside and continue to reflect on the idea of ontological difference. The main
difference between Aquinas and Heidegger that should be emphasized at this point, is that the
God/Being theory of the former leads him to consider Being in itself in a more direct way than
Heidegger.
3.2 “Being as such and as a whole” in Lorenz Puntel
There should also be said something of the expression “Being as such and as a whole:” this
formulation seems to hail from Heidegger’s work Nietzsche, and its translation into English is a
matter of some dispute34, though this detail need not detain us from using it in the present
context. Our first main point is to explore its utility in articulating the ontological difference in a
general way; our second main point is to show briefly the way the expression is understood in the
specific context of the contemporary German philosopher Lorenz Puntel’s thought. The purpose
of the whole reflection is, as it is in this whole section, to explore some different ways of
conceptualizing and thinking Being as such.
As to the first main point, the distinction between “Being as such and as a whole” can be
understood in two general ways: one way would be to see it as a further complementary
32
The word is used here as a synonym for cognitional theory; as a theory of the faculties of perception and
knowledge, and as prior to epistemology as theory of truth; the terms can often be used interchangeably.
33
”Being and essence is what is first conceived by the intellect[…]”; ” ens autem et essentia sunt quae primo
intellectu concipiuntur.” Cf. Aquinas, De Ente et Essentia 1, English translation by Joseph Kenny, O.P., retrieved from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DeEnte&Essentia.htm
34
Cf. Emad, Parvis, Translation and interpretation: learning from Beiträge, Bucharest: Zeta books, 2012, 81-83.
13
formulation of the distinction between Being and beings; this presupposes the splitting of the
expression into two component parts: “Being as such” and “Being as a whole;” (this is the way in
which Puntel understands it, although he gives these component parts specific meaning which
will be discussed shortly.) it is evident that we have done something akin to this in the preceding
discussion, in so far as we have appropriated the phrase “Being as such,” from the first
component of Puntel’s expression, in our attempt to formulate our own version of the question
of Being. But what does the second component of the expression denote if the expression as
such is taken to refer generally to the distinction between Being and beings, i.e. the ontological
difference? “Being as a whole” could mean either the totality of all beings, i.e. the Universe; or it
could mean that one is taking a view of all beings such that one is considering them as a genuine
whole, which is greater than the sum of its parts. Another way to understand the expression
would be to take it as a whole, without splitting it up: “Being as such and as a whole” could then
be given a meaning that it extensionally wider than the term “Being as such” by adding to it that
of “and as a whole;” if we would make use of this understanding of the term in the present
context, it could perhaps be taken to signify the way in which Being as such, i.e. the God/Being
of Thomas Aquinas, can be seen within the framework of participatory metaphysics to
encompass all beings by donating being to them and therefore enveloping them by being their
“whole.” This line of thinking will be revisited in the later discussion of existential participation in
Section 5.3.
Now, continuing with our second main point, we would like to give brief account of the role this
distinction plays in the work of Lorenz Puntel, who has proposed a comprehensive metaphysical
philosophy that explicitly attends to questions of Being. Puntel makes use of this distinction in a
technical way in his Struktur und Sein35, and in Sein und Gott36; the first being a systematic
presentation of his philosophy, and the latter a more specific work that applies this system to the
question of God. With regard to the expression “Being as such and as a whole,” this term is
taken to signify two conceptually distinct dimensions in Puntels work. The relation between
“Being as such” and “Being as a whole” is both “the relation between the dimension of thinking/
mind/ language and that of world/ universe/ Being-in-the-objective-sense.”; a relation that
35
Puntel, Lorenz, Struktur und Sein. Ein Theorierahmen für eine systematische Philosophie. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag,
2006. For the present thesis, I have consulted the English translation, Structure and Being: A Theoretical Framework for a
Systematic Philosophy; translated by and in collaboration with Alan White, University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2008.
36
Puntel, Lorenz, Sein und Gott : ein systematischer Ansatz in Auseinandersetzung mit M. Heidegger, E. Lévinas und J.-L.
Marion. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010. Just as with the previous title, I have consulted the English version: Being and
God: a systematic approach in confrontation with Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-Luc Marion, Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 2011.
14
“binds the two dimensions together such that both become visible as subdimensions of a single,
primordial dimension, the dimension of Being.”; and also the relation between the necessary
dimension of Being (Being as such)—which Heidegger would term ontological—and the
contingent dimension of Being (Being as a whole)—which Heidegger would term ontic. Finally,
this distinction is used to determine the place of God within Puntels systematic, viz. as identical
with the necessary dimension of Being. The advantage of this strategy is that it is able to
thematize both an absolutely differentiated aspect of Being—as Being is distinct from beings; as well
as a unitive aspect of Being—both necessary and contingent Being is in Being, is Being. Like we
saw in the previous paragraph, this finds resonance in the Aquinian God/Being theory in so far
as the primary Being of God/Being is also found in beings by way of their participation.
Now, as with Heidegger, we do not intend for Puntel’s distinction to carry the fully determinate
meaning that it does in the context of his philosophy, but like the previously elaborated
distinctions, we have introduced both the expression “Being as such and as a whole”—and the
possible distinction that can be made out of it—and Puntel’s system, to explore ways of
conteptualizing our question and so enable us to further determine the point of view we are
attempting to inhabit, and the prior understanding that informs the way we pose our question.
3.3 Situating the ontological difference in a Thomist framework
At this point we will return to Aquinas and begin the process of correlating our question of Being
to his God/Being theory. We will also begin to draw together and translate the theoretical
distinctions that have been made thus far to his terminology and framework. Firstly and
importantly then, the object of our question of Being itself is not exactly the same as the object
of metaphysics, as it is understood by Thomas. The latter understands the object of metaphysics
to be being as being (ens inquantum ens); it is a science that investigates the things that are, under
the shared aspect that they, in fact, are. The category of ens is thus a general, but a concrete
concept, because it is concretely expressed in the manifold beings in the world. Now, because
Being as such, for Thomas, is identical with God, and because God is the subject of theology,
which is a separate discipline from metaphysics37, there is not a strict one-to-one correlation
between our question and Aquinas metaphysics per se. Rather, the line of inquiry we are following
is thematically more similar to Thomas’ metaphysical consideration of the first cause of being:
37
I.e. the only science that has God as its subject is the science of the knowledge that God has of Godself, but,
because of revelation, theology can partake of this knowledge. For Aquinas’ discussion of this, see ST I, Q. 2. For an
excellent discussion in the secondary literature, see for example, Blanchette, Oliva. Philosophy of being: a reconstructive
essay in metaphysics / Oliva Blanchette. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2003, 11-42, et passim,
for a discussion of this.
15
namely of grounding the object of metaphysics—being as being—in, what we would call, natural
theology, which attains Being as such38. The procedure of this natural theology is explored in
Section 5.1. Secondly, with regard to the different formulations of the ontological difference, a
translation of them into the terminology of the Thomist framework is possible in the following
ways39: ontological difference as we have appropriated it, is first of all expressed in Aquinas’
system as the absolute difference between Being itself (ipsum esse)—which for him is identical
with his Christian conception of God—and between being in general (ens commune); these terms
are taken from St. Thomas himself. Later Thomists have translated the terms, and applied them
more or less technically, according to their individual projects and systematic reworkings of
Thomas’ thought: Bernard Lonergan (1904-1984) speaks of the difference between transcendent
being and proportionate being40; John Wippel (b.1933) speaks of finite being and uncreated
being41. In addition to these distinctions between Being and beings, and as a precondition for
them, the ontological difference is also expressed in the general compositional structure of reality
in the distinction between the act of Being (actus essendi) of a being (ens,)42 and its essence (essentia).
This is true insofar as the actus essendi participates in esse itself and thus mediates the universal
ontological difference to the level of the constitution of particular beings. These distinctions will
be discussed in the next section.
Now, again it must be stressed that we are not comparing or imposing the specifics of
Heidegger’s view onto these thinkers, neither to Thomas or later Thomists. We have taken the
term ontological difference to specify something that is both generally understandable without
much literacy in Heideggerian, as well as something already inherent in Thomas’ system;
therefore we can make use of the distinction as a heuristic tool to coordinate the different
terminologies that we have just mentioned. Our investigation will thus be of God/Being, or ipsum
esse, as the ontological reality on the near side of the ontological difference, and of being in
general, or ens commune, at the ontic reality on the far end of the same.
38
For Aquinas, natural theology is a philosophical account, based on what he calls ”natural reason”(ratio naturalis),
directed towards the same object as that of sacred doctrine or theology. Cf. ST, I, q. 1.
39
This is done while keeping in mind that Thomas’ framework of course preceded all of the actual expressions of
the distinctions made in the preceding section.
40
See especially Lonergan, Insight, pp. 657-752(ch. 19-20.)
41
Cf. Wippel, John F. The metaphysical thought of Thomas Aquinas : from finite being to uncreated being, Washington, D.C.:
Catholic University of America Press, 2000. This work is wholly structured according to these categories.
42
According to Thomas, the reason for calling something a being at all, is because of the act of Being that is in it. Cf.
De Ver, q. 1, a. 1.
16
4 Components of Aquinas’ theory: actuality/potentiality and
Being/essence
Aquinas’ God/Being theory is an integrated part of his philosophical framework and relies on a
whole range of prerequisite theoretical components. In so far as metaphysics is seen by Aquinas
to be the study of being qua being, it is seen as a science which analyzes the deep structures of being
so as to differentiate and categorize it: thus we have the distinctions between the ten categories of
being, the different compositions of being, of substance and accident, matter and form, actuality
and potentiality, Being and essence. In the following we will provide an account of the two last
distinctions in this list, as they are of crucial significance for the logic of the subsequent
argument: firstly, the Aristotelian distinction between act and potency; secondly, a distinction which
is one of the most important non-Aristotelian aspects of Thomas’ metaphysics43: the distinction
between Being and essence.
Firstly then, there is the distinction made by Aristotle—and integrated in Thomas’ system—
between being-in-act and being-in-potency. In Aristotle the theory can be seen as an attempt to
overcome a crucial problem inherited from Presocratic philosophy: namely the
Parmenidean/Heraclitean problematic of identity/permanence versus change44—or its related
problem: unity versus plurality, i.e. “the one and the many”. The problem had already been
tackled by Aristotle’s mentor Plato by the postulation of the theory of forms, which—according
to conventional wisdom—relegated the unity, or permanence, of being to the unchanging and
ideal world of the forms; and change and instability to the sensible world of materiality. Aristotle,
for his part, tackles the problem in his own way by introducing the distinction between actuality
(entelechia/energeia) and potency (dunamis)45. Change is not an introduction of non-being into being,
but an actualization of potential being that were already inherent in the substance that changes;
conversely, permanence is not a matter of closing down the possibility for change because the
substance has continuity through the change by persisting in being the whole time. With regard
to time, this is connected both to motion and to potentiality so that “no eternal thing exists
43
Wippel, John F. Metaphysical themes in Thomas Aquinas II, Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press,
2007, 9.
44
Cfr. Feser, Edward, Scholastic metaphysics: a contemporary introduction, Frankfurt: Ontos, 2014, 34. Note that Feser
applies the act/potency distinction to both permanence/change and unity/plurality, while W. Norris Clarke, chooses
to see the essence/existence distinction as a distinct solution to the unity/plurality problematic on a universal level,
and the matter/form distinction as a solution on a regional level. Cf. Clarke, W. Norris, The one and the many: a
contemporary Thomistic metaphysics, Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2001, ch.5-6
45
These terms are gradually presented in the Metaphysics, and is explicitly the subject of Book IX: Theta, of the same
work.
17
potentially”46 according to Aristotle; conversely, actuality is connected with eternity and
metaphysical necessity in contrast with the contingency of time-bound beings: “all imperishable
things, then, exist actually. Nor can anything which is of necessity exist potentially; yet these
things are primary; for if these did not exist, nothing would exist.”47; as well as the transcendental
character of goodness: “[…] therefore we may also say that in the things which are from the
beginning, i.e. in eternal things, there is nothing bad.”48 These ideas are all prerequisite
components of Aquinas’ system in general, and of his God/Being theory in particular.
Our second theoretical component is the later development, which Aquinas inherited from the
Arabic philosopher Avicenna49: namely the distinction between Being (esse) and essence (essentia).
This distinction builds on the act/potency distinction in so far as the essentia of a thing is seen as
one specific type of potency, and its esse, as an actuality50. Formulated differently: for Aquinas,
actuality is grounded in Being, or esse, and essential is seen as a carrier of potentiality thus
delimiting what the being can be. The essentia of a thing—or substance—then, is its nature; simply
put, what, the thing is. In Thomas’ system, essentia is ascertained by differentiating the substance
from other substances by means of the categories of kind (genus,) and specific difference
(differentia.) The Being of a thing is, as the actus essendi, an act, or actuality, which—here we are
back into the dangerous waters of attempting to say just what Being is—concretizes the whatness
of the being, so that it exists and is, because of the Being which is “in” it. This amounts to saying
that Aquinas’ notion of Being, as an act of Being, enters compositionally into the structure of
beings—or rather, is what makes or generates this structure in so far as it is something real and
concrete—and is thus a depth dimension, or deep structure, of reality for Aquinas. Both of these
distinctions will be important later on in our argument, because through them, Aquinas will be
able to demonstrate—using his term—the existence of a first cause of beings, that, by way of
these deep structures of being, can be understood to be identical with Being itself.
46
Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX, 8.
47
Ibid, IX, 8.
48
Ibid, IX, 9.
49
No doubt Avicenna was an early source of this distinction, and it may be supposed in the present context that
Thomas got his distinction from him. For a discussion of this, see the chapter ”The Latin Avicenna as a Source for
Thomas Aquinas’s Metaphysics” in Wippel, Metaphysical themes, 31-64.
50
Feser, Scholastic metaphysics, 267-268.
18
5 Aquinas’ God/Being theory
With the preliminary determination of the question of Being itself through the concept of
ontological difference, and the prerequisite distinctions between act/potency, and Being/essence
in place, we are ready to begin our ascent from the world of beings towards their ultimate cause.
5.1 The logical development of natural theology from prime mover to Being
itself
Perhaps the best way to understand Aquinas’ core philosophical ideas about God is to begin
from his natural theology. Although he was a Christian theologian and believed that Christian
revelation is the primary source of knowledge of God, Aquinas also thought that philosophical
reflection could attain partial knowledge of the divine. This natural theological reflection is
probably best characterized as still being theology, but it is theology as aided by philosophical
metaphysics,51 proceeding by the instrument of natural reason. In the following subsection we
will give an outline of the logical steps in this procedure, beginning from what is known as the
argument from motion, whose conclusion is the famous unmoved mover, through a series of
deductive arguments that unfold the implicit attributes—or lack of attributes—of this first cause.
Ultimately, we will end up at the point where Aquinas can exhibit the first cause as Being itself,
and along the way we will have witnessed some of the internal logic of the God/Being theory.
5.1.1 Prima via: deducing the existence of a first cause of Being
The first of the so-called five ways, Aquinas’ arguments for God’s existence, found in varying
forms both in the ST and in the SCG, is the argument from motion. We will quote the shorter
initial presentation of it from the latter text:
51
As Aquinas says in the beginning of ST: “This science (Sacred doctrine or theology) can in a sense depend upon
the philosophical sciences, not as though it stood in need of them, but only in order to make its teaching clearer. For
it accepts its principles not from other sciences, but immediately from God, by revelation. Therefore it does not
depend upon other sciences as upon the higher, but makes use of them as of the lesser, and as handmaidens: even so
the master sciences make use of the sciences that supply their materials, as political of military science. That it thus
uses them is not due to its own defect or insufficiency, but to the defect of our intelligence, which is more easily led
by what is known through natural reason (from which proceed the other sciences) to that which is above reason,
such as are the teachings of this science;” “Ad secundum dicendum quod haec scientia accipere potest aliquid a
philosophicis disciplinis, non quod ex necessitate eis indigeat, sed ad maiorem manifestationem eorum quae in hac
scientia traduntur. Non enim accipit sua principia ab aliis scientiis, sed immediate a Deo per revelationem. Et ideo
non accipit ab aliis scientiis tanquam a superioribus, sed utitur eis tanquam inferioribus et ancillis; sicut
architectonicae utuntur subministrantibus, ut civilis militari. Et hoc ipsum quod sic utitur eis, non est propter
defectum vel insufficientiam eius, sed propter defectum intellectus nostri; qui ex his quae per naturalem rationem (ex
qua procedunt aliae scientiae) cognoscuntur, facilius manuducitur in ea quae sunt supra rationem, quae in hac scientia
traduntur.” Cf. ST I, q. 1, a. 5, ad. 2.
19
Of these ways the first is as follows. Everything that is moved is moved by another. That
some things are in motion—for example, the sun—is evident from sense. Therefore, it is
moved by something else that moves it. This mover is itself either moved or not moved. If
it is not, we have reached our conclusion—namely, that we must posit some unmoved
mover. This we call God. If it is moved, it is moved by another mover. We must,
consequently, either proceed to infinity, or we must arrive at some unmoved mover. Now,
it is not possible to proceed to infinity. Hence, we must posit some prime unmoved
mover.52
The principle of the prima via then, is that “everything which is moved is moved by something
else.” Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees motion (motus) as representing the change (mutatio)53 in a
substance from potency to actuality: what is moved must have a potentiality to move, and motion
is the actualizing of this potentiality54. Now, the motion itself is neither potency nor act but
something between: an imperfect act that is partly potential with regard to the perfect act that it
moves towards and which is the end of the motion.55 With regard to the two relata of the
principle just described, the things that are moved are in a state of potency and the cause of the
motion, the mover, is in a state of act, actualizing the potential motion in the moved. According
to Aquinas, these two aspects of motion can not be derived from the same specific instance of
motion: the moved which is in potency cannot actualize its own potency, because that would
require it to be in act. If it were already moving, already being actualized, this would not obtain,
but for an explanation of the beginning of motion at all from pure potentiality, the difficulty
remains. There is thus the impossibility of self-motion with regard to first motion, due to the fact
that “motion lacks self-originating spontaneity”56. But what can then account for the fact of
motion? If everything which is moved is moved by another, which is again moved by another, we
52
The latin reads: “Quarum prima talis est: omne quod movetur, ab alio movetur. Patet autem sensu aliquid moveri,
utputa solem. Ergo alio movente movetur. Aut ergo illud movens movetur, aut non. Si non movetur, ergo habemus
propositum, quod necesse est ponere aliquod movens immobile. Et hoc dicimus Deum. Si autem movetur, ergo ab
alio movente movetur. Aut ergo est procedere in infinitum: aut est devenire ad aliquod movens immobile. Sed non
est procedere in infinitum. Ergo necesse est ponere aliquod primum movens immobile.” Cf. SCG I, 13, 3.
53
Also following Aristotle, Aquinas takes mutatio to be of three different sorts: generation, corruption, and motion.
In the present context we will not attempt a judgement of what kind of change is referenced to in this argument. For
a good discussion of this, see Wippel, Metaphysical thought, 444-458.
54
The reason why Aristotle and Aquinas use the potency-act distinction to explain motion is that any attempt to
define the latter in terms of passage or transition already presupposes the concept of motion. Therefore both
philosophers rely on the metaphysically more fundamental concepts—notions that are per priora et notiora, prior and
better known— as just described. Importantly, and even though Aquinas uses mundane empirical examples such as
wood catching fire, the type of reasoning itself is not empirical in character but metaphysical. Cf. Velde, Rudi A. te.
Aquinas on God : the 'divine science' of the Summa theologiae, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.
55
Velde, Aquinas on God, 56.
56
Ibid, 58.
20
have an infinite regress, and motion is left unaccounted for. If the whole nexus of motion cannot
be self-originating, then it seems that the cause of motion is not to be found on the same level as
the series; there is thus the necessity of the existence of an origin of motion: this is the
(in)famous unmoved mover—the prime mover that is “outside” the series of moved movers.
What has happened then is that the unintelligibility of motion within the series of ontic beings-in-
motion (ens mobile), has relativized the whole series, and revealed it as contingent upon an
ontological principle of motion that is its ground. Thus we have reached a transcendent first
cause.
5.1.2 Ascending the way of remotion in Summa Contra Gentiles
We have shown that there exists a first being, whom we call God. We must, accordingly, now
investigate the properties of this being.57
The way Thomas begins the investigation of the properties of God58 is by what he calls the way
of remotion (via remotionis). Remotion in this context refers to the process of gradually subtracting
properties that are seen to be incoherent to attribute to the divine substance, and which yields
positive attributes that are wholly determined by the negation of some aspect of finite reality59.
Thomas explains his rationale thus: "by its immensity, the divine substance surpasses every form
that our intellect reaches. Thus we are unable to apprehend it by knowing what it is. Yet we are
able to have some knowledge of it by knowing what it is not."60Thomas thinks that this partial
knowledge can be generated in a way that is analogous to the way we arrive at knowledge of
ordinary substances through locating them in a genus and adding differentiae to further specify it;
the difference being that God cannot be located in a genus, and cannot be ascribed positive
differentiae; but we can add negative differentiae to the definition and this will yield some knowledge
of God according to Aquinas.61 Now, with the preliminary epistemological qualifications in place,
Thomas is ready to proceed by way of remotion. We will follow him through some of the key
57
SCG I, 14, 1.
58
In so far as Aquinas’ reasoning is meant to model a process by which natural reason can come to know God as
cause through God’s effects, we have only yet reached the level where a putative alpha can be postulated, i.e. a very
thin definition of a first cause whose attributes will have to be deduced for a fuller concept to emerge. For an
excellent performance of this gradual procedure, see Kretzmann, Norman, The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural
Theology in Summa contra gentiles I, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
59
In the sense that we can take the property of “temporality”, and by adding the alpha privative to get
“atemporality,” we get—in Aquinas’ definition—eternity. Negative theology would be one conventional definition of
this procedure.
60
SCG I, 14, 2.
61
Ibid, 3.
21
junctures in this procedure; we will see how the distinctions between act/potency, and between
Being/essence are ingeniously utilized in Aquinas’ deductions.
The starting point—or "principle"—of Thomas' way of remotion towards knowledge of God is
the property of the first cause as unmoved—which he has established in the preceeding chapters.
Implicit in the argument from motion is the denial of potentiality to God; who is therefore said
to be a pure act of Being (actus purus). But if there is no motion and therefore no potentiality in
God, neither can God be in time—a category that is defined by motion and potentiality—thus
God is eternal. Further deduction of the nature of the first cause reveals that it is incoherent to
think of this unmoved, eternal, pure act, as composite; the most basic composition of the
intelligible structure of being is that of potency and act, but this has already been denied of God;
therefore God is utterly and completely simple. This is the final step which allows Thomas to
make his assertion and to schematically complete his God/Being theory: if God is perfectly
simple, then God’s Being and essence are the same—God is Being itself.
5.2 Summit of Being: the transcendence and aseity of Being itself
Having ascended from beings through the logic of the natural theological, and negative deductive
procedures of the preceding sections, we have come to a point where it will finally be appropriate
to consider God/Being in itself, or as such, or as distinct from beings. In so far as the articulation
of what Being is in itself is the explicit objective of the question of Being, we will now be able to
present Aquinas’ answer in a more direct fashion. While the preceding exposition has
approximated a consideration of God/Being in itself by showing how the first cause is
understood as is uncaused, unconditioned, utterly simple, the subsequent paragraphs will focus
specifically on the the themes of the transcendence and the aseity (in-itselfness) of God/Being.
The purpose of this is to contradistinguish Being itself, ipusm esse, from being in general, ens
commune, and so to show how Aquinas envisions God/Being as absolutely separated from, and
transcendent relative to beings.
With regard to the concept of the aseity of God/Being we will take this term to signify the self-
existing62, or self-sufficient, absolutely transcendent status of the latter in contradistinction to
62
Note that the concept of self-existence is not meant to invoke or allude to the concept and problematic of the
causa sui; the latter is a technical term that expresses the self-causation of the divine and is found in both Suarez and
Spinoza among others, but over against this Aquinas prefers to call God/Being “first uncaused cause”. It is also the
term about which Heidegger famously remarked: “This is the right name for the god of philosophy. Man can neither
pray nor sacrifice to this god. Before the causa sui, man can neither fall to his knees in awe nor can he play music and
dance before this god.” The English quote is taken from Heidegger, Martin, Identität und Differenz: English Identity and
difference. Translated and with an introd. by Joan Stambaugh, 1st ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. For good discussions
of the causa sui problematic, see Caputo, John D, Philosophy and theology, Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2006, 35-44 et
passim; and Elders, Leo, The philosophical theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Leiden; New York: E.J. Brill, 1990, 150-154.
22
beings. While the term aseity does not seem to play a significant role in Aquinas or in his
contemporary interpreters, the notion of God/Being existing per se, carries the exact meaning that
we attribute to the term here. Thus when Aquinas writes that “God is Being itself subsisting
by/in itself” (deus est ipsum esse[…] per se subsistens)63 we should want to term this an expression of
the aseity of God/Being.
As an illustration of this notion of aseity, we might advert to a specific problematic discussed by

Aquinas: whether God/Being is the formal Being of all things. The question he is responding to
is whether God/Being as Being itself is identical with the act of Being that is in all beings. If this
were the case, there would be no distinction between Being itself and being in general, and thus
there would be no transcendence or aseity with respect to God/Being. Now, Thomas is
vehemently opposed to this error and he combats it with several different arguments. To connect
with the preceding treatment of God/Being, we will consider a specific objection to this idea:
Then, too, a principle is naturally prior to that whose principle it is. Now, in certain things being
has something that is as its principle. For the form is said to be a principle of being, and so is the
agent, that makes things to be in act. If, therefore, the divine being is the being of each thing, it will
follow that God, Who is His own being, has some cause. Thus, He is not through Himself a
necessary being. But, we have proved the contrary of this conclusion above.64
The core of Aquinas’ response is to show the incoherence of attributing the principles of
determination (as the way form determines matter) and causation (by which an agent actualizes a
potency in a being and thus conditions it) to necessary, uncaused, God/Being itself. This is
incoherent because the first cause has already been shown to be devoid of these properties.
Indeed, it was the conditioned and contingent character of beings that first gave Aquinas the
starting point from which to derive the existence and character God/Being in the first place
(Section 5.1), and so, according to the logic of this derivation, God/Being must be seen as
unconditioned and infinite: in short God/Being is the transcendent Summit of Being.65
63
For example in Aquinas’ Compendium theologiae, ch. 15. Cf. Aquinas, Thomas, Compendium theologiae, English
translation by Cyril Vollert, S.J., retrieved from: http://dhspriory.org/thomas/Compendium.htm
64
“Principium naturaliter prius est eo cuius est principium. Esse autem in quibusdam rebus habet aliquid quasi
principium: forma enim dicitur esse principium essendi; et similiter agens, quod facit aliqua esse actu. Si igitur esse
divinum sit esse uniuscuiusque rei, sequetur quod Deus, qui est suum esse, habeat aliquam causam; et sic non sit
necesse-esse per se. Cuius contrarium supra ostensum est.” SCG I, 26.
65
It would perhaps seem felicitous to apply the term ens summum, or highest being, to God/Being considered under
the aspect of transcendence. but Aquinas clearly prefers ipsum esse, Being itself; and while the latter does use the term
being, or ens, for God/Being in some contexts, there is needed an especially strong emphasis on the analogical nature
of this language here. What is at stake is keeping the distance to so-called ”perfect-being theology” intact, and our
hope is that the Aquinian vision of God/Being that we have tried to articulate in these paragraphs, maintains this
distance.
23
5.3 Ground of Being (and grounded beings): immanence through
participational mediation
With the Summit of Being, God/Being, having been shown to be transcendent and distinct from
beings, it remains to make the descent back to beings and so consider the absolute relation of
God/Being to beings. If we have shown how Aquinas’ logic of ontological difference
distinguishes absolutely between Being and beings, we must now show how he mediates between
the two. Thus we will consider God/Being as the immanent ground of beings in so far as ontic
beings are participations in ontological Being itself; we will also examine the theoretical
framework that allows Aquinas to express this intelligibly, viz. the analogy of being.
5.3.1 The participation of beings in the ground of universal perfection
This subsection will be concerned with highlighting two aspects of Aquinas’ metaphysics of
participation66: the plenitude of Being itself and its identification with God/Being, and the
participation of beings in this plenitude. The ubiquity of the category of esse will be on full display
in the following paragraphs in which we will let Aquinas’ understanding of this term draw
together the separate realities of God/Being and beings into a deep ontological relationship.
Firstly then, insofar as God/Being is the first cause of beings which has been demonstrated
through the argument of motion, God/Being is cause of the principle of esse itself (causa essendi).
This means that God/Being donates its esse to beings; is the ground and source of esse itself;
carries within itself the whole plenitude of the perfection67 of Being (perfectio essendi). With regard
to the plenitudinal character of Being it is worth quoting a longer passage of Thomas’ on this
topic:
What I call being, esse, is the most perfect of all: and this is apparent because the act is
always more perfect than the potency. For a certain form is not understood to be in act
unless it is said to be. For humanity or fieriness can be considered either as latent in the
potentiality of matter, or in the power of an agent, or even just in the mind; but by having
66
In this subsection (as well as all the others), we have the difficult task of giving a very short, but sufficiently
accurate, summarized synthesis of the issue; thus, we will not discuss which of the different systems of participation
is the ”proper” one, or the differences between them. We can simply note that participation can be construed in
different ways, for example as according to composition, where every being is seen as a composite of participating
elements (substance, nature, accidents) and an element that is participated in, viz. esse, or the act of Being; or
according to imitation, where the esse of a being imitates the divine esse; or according to causality, where an effect is
said to participate in its cause. For an excellent overview of the different interpretations of participation in Aquinas,
see Wippel, Metaphysical thought, 94-131.
67
A perfection is a very general term for the positive aspects of Being; it is quantified according to an idea of a
hierarchy of Being with God/Being at the top; it is an expression of the plenitude of Being and is inherent to the
latter; thus the essentia, of a being can not add any perfection to it that is not in its esse.
24
esse it actually comes to exist. From which it is clear that what I call esse is the actuality of all
acts, and therefore the perfection of all perfections. And to what I call esse nothing can be
added that is more formal, which determines it, in the way that the act determines the
potency: for esse, taken in this manner, differs essentially from something to which an
addition can be made by way of determining. For nothing can be added to esse which is
extraneous to it, because nothing is extraneous to it except non-being[…]68
Esse then, is both the actualizing, concretizing, power of anything at all to be, and it contains the
fullness of all positivity, i.e. all perfections. Any positive aspect that exists is grounded in the
actuality of esse, which is itself unlimited, unconditioned, and undetermined, and is ultimately
grounded in God/Being itself69. Aquinas’ God as ipsum esse, Being itself, is thus identified with the
universal perfection of Being (perfectio essendi), which indeterminately—because simply and
infinitely—contains all determinate perfections, and is thus a condition of the possibility for any
perfection at all: i.e. all the ontic perfections of creatures are derived from the ontological ground
of perfection in God/Being. Moreover, we see in the quote above how the logic of this
relationship can be expressed in the categories of cause and effect, by the way Aquinas links the
Aristotelian understanding of causation that “the act is always more perfect than the potency,”
with his theory of God/Being as the pure actuality which is the cause of the existence of any and
all beings. This amounts to saying that there is an absolute asymmetry between the infinite Being
of the perfectio essendi in God/Being, and the finite being of creatures: Aquinas’ natural theology
has proceeded from effects to cause, and found that the first and universal cause of being
infinitely transcends its effects. But the relationship of ground and grounded is a mediatory
relationship: and what is mediated is the immanence of God/Being itself.
Secondly, as a variation on the same theme, we have the opposite side of the mediation of
ontological difference: namely the logic of participation which makes intelligible the relationship
of beings to their ground. The mechanism of participation is, again, spelled out in terms of the
composition of esse and essentia: the esse of a thing is an act which is brimming with potential, but
which has been limited in the instance of a particular being, to expressing just that being; it is
limited by the being’s essence which, in the composition with its act of Being is the potency of
that act. Now, there are technically different types of participations in esse according to Aquinas,
who never misses a chance to make an interesting distinction; thus he makes, for example, the
68
De pot, q. 7, a. 2, ad. 9.
69
The above quote doesn’t mention divine esse, but its context is specifically a discussion of the identification of God
with Being itself in the familiar form of ”That God’s essence is the same as His Being”; further Aquinas gives us a
direct argument for seeing the plenitude of esse as grounded in God/Being in the so-called proof from degrees of
perfection, his quarta via in ST I, q. 2, a. 3.
25
relevant distinction between considering beings as participations in esse commune (the act of Being
in general,) and in esse subsistens (God/Being,) but while this is an interesting parsing out of the
ontological difference in terms of the constitutive compositional structure of reality, this need not
detain us because our arguments is about the participation of beings in God/Being, and this
relation is universal for Aquinas.70 The construal of this relation arguably represents one of the
more Platonic elements in Aquinas’ though, a fact which is clearly seen by the character of
graduality in the participation of Being:
The term to be, [esse] taken simply and absolutely, is understood only of the divine [Being].
This is also true of the good; and for this reason it is said in Luke (18:19): “None is good
but God alone.” Hence, the more closely a creature approaches God, the more it possesses
of the act of [Being]; the further it is from Him, the more it possesses of non-[Being]. But,
since a creature approaches God only in so far as it participates in a finite act of [Being],
yet its distance from God is always infinite, it is said to have more non-[Being] than
[Being].71
This rich passage illustrates two important points about Thomas’ metaphysics of participation.
Firstly, we have here an important reminder that the esse, or Being of a thing does denote not its
mere existence, but that it expresses a dynamic and concrete act. This is seen by the quantitative,
or gradualized, character of esse: beings participate in Being in different degrees, and in every
being there is a mixture of Being and non-Being. This shows that the concept of esse is richer
than the concept of existence—at least as this is ordinarily understood72—for a thing either exists
or it doesn’t; things do not exist to different degrees. Secondly, we can see that the measure of
Being that is participated in by the ens participatio, is according to its proximity to ipsum esse, to
God/Being itself. Between the two poles of the ontological difference—all the beings that make
up the Universe, on the one hand, and their primordial ground in Being itself on the other—
there is thus mediatory relationship; this relationship is what is expressed by the concept of
participation: it is the same esse that is in both Being and beings, although not in the same sense:
but in an analogical sense. And thus we have come to the last juncture in our investigation.
70
For a much more detailed exposition of this, see Wippel, Metaphysical thought, 94-131.
71
De Ver, Q. 2, a. 3, ad. 16. I have replaced the word existence with Being in this quote, the explanation for this is
given in note 2, and in Section 3.1.
72
Note that I am simply contrasting the notion of Being with a common-sense notion of existence. This is not an
attempt to undermine or question the understanding of, for example, existential Thomists that have a much richer
conception of the word ”existence”.
26
5.3.2 The analogy of Being: semantics of participation
Two things cannot be rightly put together without a third; there must be some bond of union
between them. …and the fairest bond is that which makes the most complete fusion of itself and
the things which it combines, and [analogy] is best adapted to effect such a union.73
[…] every putatively meaningful theological affirmation dangles upon a golden but fragile thread of
analogy74.
In the final subsection of our exposition we will give an account of Aquinas’ doctrine of the
analogy of Being. We will see how Aquinas uses this framework to articulate Being in such a way
that it maintains its all-encompassing character, while still allowing for its differentiation. In so far
as this is the function of analogy, the following paragraphs can only be seen as felicitous at this
point as the somewhat repetitive recital of the word “Being” in our text so far may already have
alerted the reader especially to the need of such a differentiation: thus far we have spoken of
Being itself, the Being of beings, the act of Being, the different properties and structure of Being,
and the identification of God and Being. When Being is said in all of these different ways, the
word signifies both something that is similar between them and something in need of
differentiation; thus, for Being to achieve its proper meaning we have now to examine how it is
possible to speak of Being analogically. Specifically we will be concerned with the topic of
analogical predication (praedicatio analogica), the analogy of (divine) nomination (analogia
nominum)—which is a way of speaking intelligibly but reservedly about the divine—and of the
grounding of these modes of discourse in the idea of analogy as a mediatory ontological property
of being (analogia entis). When thus discussing the need for, and purpose of analogy we are back to
the problematic of the one and the many—to the tensions between unity and difference, identity
and permanence, and thus between absolute monism and radical pluralism—and we will see how
this is resolved by Aquinas into a framework for thinking similarity in difference. In Section 4,
we examined the distinctions between act/potency, and Being/essence, and these can be seen as
theoretical components contributing to this framework, but the theoretical framework as a whole
can, arguably, be seen as analogical. To begin this account, we will introduce the basic concept of
analogy with a few words on its ancient Greek background.75
73
Plato, Timaeus 31b-32a
74
Hart, David B., “God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of creatio ex nihilo”, Radical Orthodoxy: Theology,
Philosophy, Politics, Vol. 3, 2015.
75
The connections between these different ancient Greek thinkers and Aquinas are covered in an accessible way in
Rocca, Gregory P., Speaking the incomprehensible God : Thomas Aquinas on the interplay of positive and negative theology,
Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2004, 77-93.
27
The Greek philosophical concept of analogia is arguably as ancient as the Presocratics, having as
its original meaning a geometric-mathematical proportionality (i.e. 1:2 is proportionate to 2:4). In
Plato, the term is expanded into something of a philosophical heuristic device, and we see how
the virtues of the soul and the classes of the ideal state is derived by way of analogy. With this
enlarged concept of analogy, Aristotle could systematically build the foundation upon which later
analogical theories were built. One relevant example which turns up again in Aquinas, would be
Aristotle’s definition of analogical predication as an alternative to equivocal predication—for
example, in explaining how the virtues are all good but yet are not good in the same way.
If the act/potency distinction, as well as the theories of causality and many other aspects of
Thomas’ thought, represent its Aristotelian elements; and if the metaphysics of participation, and
of the plenitude of Being, represent its Platonic elements; the doctrine of analogy can be seen as a
reductio ad unum of the two76: i.e. a resolution of these diverse influences (and at the same time, of
the tension both between identity and difference in general and the ontological difference
between Being and beings in particular) into a theoretical framework that can accommodate
them. Thus, in Aquinas, the concept of analogy can be seen as the “bond of union” that Plato
speaks about in the introductory quote to this subsection; as a mediatory middle way between
extremes, and as a comprehensive formula and principle77 for both general metaphysics and
theology.
The framework of analogy should probably be seen as arising on two different levels78 for
Aquinas: the predicamental (as in Aristotle) which posits analogy as an alternative to univocal and
equivocal predications; and the vertical/transcendental (harkening back to Plato and
Neoplatonism). On the predicamental level, analogy is seen as a middle way between univocity
and equivocity with respect to the categorization of esse commune (Being in general) into the ten
categories of Aristotle. The categories are the fundamental way that the structure of Being is
described in Aquinas’ metaphysics; they all pertain to the things that are united in Being, and yet
they denote different aspects of these beings. With respect to analogical predication on this level,
Aquinas writes:
76
For an excellent account which takes this perspective on Aquinas’ doctrine of analogy, see Montagnes, Bernard,
The doctrine of the analogy of being according to Thomas Aquinas, translated into English by E. M. Macierowski ; translation reviewed
and corrected by Pol Vandevelde ; edited with revisions by Andrew Tallon, Milwaukee, Wis: Marquette University Press, 2004,
esp. 7-21.
77
Cf. Przywara, Erich, Analogia entis: metaphysics: original structure and universal rhythm, translated by John R. Betz and David
Bentley Hart, Grand Rapids, Michican: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014, 396
78
Both Wippel and Montagnes make a similar distinction between predicamental/vertical (Wippel), and
predicamental/transcendental (Montagnes). Cf. Wippel, Metaphysical thought, 73-74; and Montagnes, The doctrine of the
analogy of being, esp. 34-42.
28
[W]e must notice [that] something is predicated of many things in three ways: univocally,
equivocally and analogically. Something is predicated univocally according to the same name and
the same nature, i.e., definition, as animal is predicated of man and of ass, because each is
called animal and each is a sensible, animated substance, which is the definition of animal.
That is predicated equivocally which is predicated of some things according to the same
name but according to a different nature, as dog is said of the thing that barks and of the
star in the heavens, which two agree in the name but not in the definition or in
signification, because that which is signified by the name is the definition, as is said in the
fourth book of the Metaphysics. That is said to be predicated analogically which is
predicated of many whose natures are diverse but which are attributed to one same thing,
as health is said of the animal body, or urine and of food, but it does not signify entirely
the same thing in all three; it is said of urine as a sign of health, of body as of a subject and
of food as of a cause. But all these natures are attributed to one end, namely to health.79
The difference between the three modes of predication consists here in the relationship between
the names, or definitions, contained in the predicate, and the subject to which the predication
pertains. The level of discrepancy—or lack thereof —between predicate and subject, determine
which type of predication is appropriate. With regard to the object of metaphysics Being in
general, or esse commune, there is a clear need for the latter, analogical, type, because this concept is
shared by all beings, composed as they are of an essence that is united to an act of Being. But if
analogy is needed to make sense of unity and difference on this level, what is the “one same
thing” that Aquinas writes about, that can unite the differentiated analogates in such a
predication as when different entities are all called “beings”? Aquinas is saying that there is a
“primary instance” to which the analogy relates; secondarily to this there may be other instances
which can be called by the same name, but these may differ in many respects from the first even
if they have some similarity to it. The answer to the question of primary instance on the
predicamental level is that the analogical predication of the term (a) being, or ens—signifying that
something is a part of Being in general—primarily relates to the category of substance80. The
categories of accident, relation, quantity, quality and the like are also a part of the Being of beings,
but they are so because they have an analogical similarity to the category of substance. The
relevance of this relationship to our overall thematic will be made clearer in the next paragraph.
79
Cf. Aquinas, De principiis naturae, 46, English translation by R. A. Kocourek , retrieved from
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/DePrincNaturae.htm
80
Ibid, 48.
29
As we turn to the vertical or transcendental sort of analogy, we come back to a fundamental
motif of the present study, namely the relationship between Being and beings across the infinite
gap of absolute ontological difference. It is here that the well-known topic of divine nomination
arises in Aquinas’ thought: how are we to represent the infinite with finite words? As is also well
known, Aquinas resolves this problematic by distinguishing between the three modes of
predication that we have already seen with regard to the categorization of general Being. Thus we
have a rejection of univocal predication of divine names: God is not simply “good” or “just” in
the same way that beings can be good or just; we also have the rejection of equivocal predication:
if we call God “beautiful” we do not mean anything completely different from what we mean in
ordinary language. Instead of these we have the via eminentia81 of analogical predication: between
the Creator and the created there is enough similarity to warrant the use of creaturely words to
speak about the former, but the infinite distance between the two divine and human analogate
does qualifies this type of speech in a radical way, thus safeguarding the transcendence and
indeterminacy of God/Being.
It may seem that with these distinctions, we have merely been doing linguistics with regard to the
relationship between Being and beings; thus, to illustrate the ontological underpinnings of the
analogy between the two, we will now combine the framework of analogy with the metaphysics
of participation; here we will see how the analogy of Being takes the form of a mediatory
structure that makes the unity and difference of participation intelligible. If we ask the same
question of the primary instance of similarity in the analogy of God/Being and beings, as we did
with regard to the categorization of general Being, what could Aquinas point to as the anchor of
unity in this relation? The answer has really been given already, but the rhetorical question will
still bring some illumination. The first and primary instance involved in the dynamic of analogy is
that which the analogy primarily denotes; the secondary instance is that which it denotes to the
extent that this instance is in relationship with the first. Thus we can see that Aquinas’ system of
participation allows him to see God/Being as the primary instance of Being in regard to the
created Being of beings.82 The metaphysics of participation is thus what constitutes the
81
ST I, q. 13, et passim.
82
This connection between participation and analogy is unearthed in Bernard Montagnes’ study, The doctrine of the
analogy of being.
30
ontological ground of analogy in the very structure of Being, and therefore permits the idea, not
just of analogical language, but of a true analogy of Being (analogia entis).83
This, in brief, is an indication of the functions of analogy in Aquinas’ philosophy: analogical

predication allows for coherent thinking about the unity of Being on the one hand, and the
differentiated structure of Being on the other; while vertical or transcendental analogy allows for
coherent thinking about the differentiated participation of beings in the unity of God/Being.
To connect these ideas with our present thematic, we will note that while the notion of an
analogy of being is what permits Aquinas’ to make the participation of beings in Being
intelligible, it is conversely also what allows him to make the necessary Christian distinction
between God/Being and beings; thus, as we saw in Section 5.2, he denies the positing of
God/Being as the univocal Being of beings, while instead positing the analogical participation in
Being on the part of beings. Hence, we can see that the framework of analogy is a condition for
the possibility of Aquinas’ notion of God/Being as absolutely distinct from, and absolutely
related to, beings.
6 Conclusion: how Aquinas’ God makes all the (ontological)

difference
Our inquiry has now reached the point where we can present a summary of Aquinas answer to
the question of Being (in) itself, and examine the correspondence of the question with the answer
both with regard to its particulars and its entirety.
Before beginning our summary we should like to note preliminarily how Aquinas’ account of
God and Being radically legitimizes the question of Being itself. According to St. Thomas, it is
possible, indeed imperative, to think pure Being as the ground of the Being of beings around us.
Thus, far from having forgotten about the importance of Being, Aquinas makes it absolutely
central: and this not only to the impressive philosophical edifice he constructed, but to his
theology — which must surely have been the heart and capstone of his thought.
With regard to the different elements of Aquinas theory of God/Being we will make several
observations; each of these are, of course, amenable to criticism, but in accordance with our
objective of synthesizing and correlating Aquinas answer to the question of Being, we will not
83
I take it that this characterization would also be consistent with Przywara’s famous study of this topic. Different
Thomist have different emphases though, and the emphasis on participation in this context has, as already indicated,
been taken mainly from Montagnes’ work.
31
explore the trajectories of potential criticisms in this context, except to indicate them in note
references ad seriatim. With this caveat we may begin to summarize our findings.
Firstly then, we have seen how Aquinas does not make Being to be an unintelligible, or unknown
“x,” but neither does he make Being fully intellectually attainable. Being has a concrete and
dynamic character as an act, rather than a thing, and this informs Aquinas’ understanding of the
whole structure of reality; at the same time, this act is so pure and unbounded—even infinite—in
itself, that to any finite perspective Being itself is virtually indeterminate. We saw this when we
ascended the via remotionis in Section 5.1.2, and observed how the only determinations that could
be coherently attributed to God/Being were the lack of determinations (whether of space or
matter, time or change); and this was supplemented by the discussion of divine nomination as
analogical, demonstrating that determinate (creaturely) concepts were infinitely transcended by
God/Being. The Being that is asked about in our guiding question is thus acknowledged to be
radically indeterminate, yet intelligible. 84
Secondly, we have seen how Aquinas construes God/Being as both absolutely separated from,
and still absolutely constitutive of—and thus in the most intimate relation with—the beings that
participate in Being. This was made evident in our examination of the metaphysics of
participation in Section 5.3.1. and amounts to a closing of the gap in the middle of ontological
difference. Thus, Aquinas’ construal of the ontological difference between Being and beings is
such that its basic dichotomy is overcome through participation. And this importantly does not
mean that the absolute difference between the two is suspended: the ontological dependence of
beings on Being is such that, in themselves beings are to Being as non-Being is to Being, i.e. there is
an absolute ontological difference. But through the mediatory logic of participation, i.e. in Being
itself, beings are related to Being, and in this way the latter can be seen to envelop the whole of
the dichototomic distinction between the two.85 This amounts to a closing of the gap in the
middle of ontological difference.
84
Both of these points can be challenged on their own terms of course. It is possible for example to complain that
Aquinas’ description of Being remains mystifying: we still have not gotten an answer to what Being actually is. Now,
this response is understandable, being based as it is on an a petition for maximal intelligibility, but it may ultimately
be incommensurable with the religious sensibility of Aquinas (and his followers), who see God as absolute mystery.
But it is also possible to make the converse complaint that that Aquinas God is not really mysterious or
indeterminate at all: He (for Aquinas uses the male pronoun for the divine without blinking) has a whole range of
attributes that seem more like an intensification of human character traits than anything else. Now, that God/Being
possesses attributes that are defined in relation to creaturely perfections is something Aquinas would concede, but
instead of admitting anthropomorphism he could instead point to the intellectual necessity of postulating a first
cause for creatures, and thereby show that—according to his Aristotelian understanding—it is not at all strange that
the effects would resemble that of the cause, thereby turning the presuppositions of the objection on their head.
85
Here and throughout our discussion we have relied on the distinction between Being and beings in Aquinas’
thought. But there is one issue that we have not chosen to explore; this has to do with the question of whether
32
Thirdly, God/Being is seen as the indispensable ground for making sense of contingent beings.
This is expressed both in terms of cause and effect, as in Section 5.1. and in terms of
participation as in Section 5.3.1. But we also saw, in Section 5.3.2., how the radical asymmetry
between Being and beings where maintained even while the likeness of the latter to the former—
grounded in the metaphysics of participation—was affirmed. Aquinas’ theory thus, should not be
seen as a univocal and unproblematic argument from the Being of beings to the Being of God,
but rather as the deduction of certain basic metaphysical postulates that make reality more
coherent, even while acknowledging that these same postulates are directed towards an abyss of
mystery.
These three points summarize some of the most important ways that the logic of ontological
difference is employed in Aquinas’ theory. We can here see how the difference between
God/Being and beings is never abrogated, although it is both negotiated and mediated. Aquinas’
answer to the inquirer into Being would thus be a balanced and carefully nuanced proposal to
steer clear of the extremes both of a monism (of completely closing the ontological gap in the
middle of difference by emphasizing Being to the detriment of beings) that would religiously
imply pantheism, and which would undermine the metaphysical enterprise; and a pluralism (of
completely separating Being and beings) which would be equally incoherent metaphysically, and
which would strip the world of any opening towards transcendence.
God/Being can in some sense also be called “a being”? If we turn to Aquinas we can observe that he sometimes—
though rarely—does in fact use the term ens for God/Being. This occurs for example in SCG I, 28, where Thomas
writes that “God, Who is not other than His being, is a universally perfect being”, or in Latin, “Deus tamen qui non
est aliud quam suum esse, est universaliter ens perfectum” (emboldening mine). Importantly, in the very same
sentence, Aquinas reiterates that God is His own Being—and thus Being itself. Whether the use of ens with respect
to God/Being is a flaw of inconsistency or if such a criticism is misplaced in light of the rest of his thought will be
left undecided in this context, but it merits mentioning.
33
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36

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Rikard Dahl

2 Method, structure and approach .................................................................................... 8

3 Further determination of “the question of Being itself” .............................................. 10

3.1 Ontological difference in Martin Heidegger ......................................................................................... 10

3.2 “Being as such and as a whole” in Lorenz Puntel .............................................................................. 13

3.3 Situating the ontological difference in a Thomist framework ................................................................ 15

4 Components of Aquinas’ theory: actuality/potentiality and Being/essence ............... 17

5 Aquinas’ God/Being theory .......................................................................................... 19

5.1.2 Ascending the way of remotion in Summa Contra Gentiles ........................................................ 21

5.3.1 The participation of beings in the ground of universal perfection................................................... 24

5.3.2 The analogy of Being: semantics of participation ......................................................................... 27

“The divine substance is being itself, and from it comes being.”2’

2 Method, structure and approach

The structure of the thesis will be as follows:

3 Further determination of “the question of Being itself”

3.1 Ontological difference in Martin Heidegger

3.2 “Being as such and as a whole” in Lorenz Puntel

3.3 Situating the ontological difference in a Thomist framework

5.1.1 Prima via: deducing the existence of a first cause of Being

5.1.2 Ascending the way of remotion in Summa Contra Gentiles

5.2 Summit of Being: the transcendence and aseity of Being itself

As an illustration of this notion of aseity, we might advert to a specific problematic discussed by

5.3.1 The participation of beings in the ground of universal perfection

This, in brief, is an indication of the functions of analogy in Aquinas’ philosophy: analogical

6 Conclusion: how Aquinas’ God makes all the (ontological)

Aristotle, Metaphysics, translation by W. D. Ross, retrieved from:

Aquinas, Thomas, De principiis naturae, English translation by R. A. Kocourek , retrieved from

Blanchette, Oliva. Philosophy of being : a reconstructive essay in metaphysics / Oliva Blanchette.

Feser, Edward, Scholastic metaphysics: a contemporary introduction, Frankfurt: Ontos, 2014.

Kenny, Anthony, Aquinas on being, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Plato, Timaeus, English translation by Benjamin Jowett, retrieved from:

Vallicella, William F. A paradigm theory of existence : onto-theology vindicated , Dordrecht; Boston:

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