Rikard Dahl

QUESTIONING BEING
The logic of ontological difference in Aquinas God/Being theory

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1
Table of Content

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............................................................................................16

5 Aquinas God/Being theory...................................................................18

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..........................................................................23

5.3.1 The participation of beings in the ground of universal perfection

24

5.3.2 The analogy of Being: semantics of participation......................26

6 Conclusion: how Aquinas God makes all the (ontological) difference 28

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.htm
l
(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/ContraGentile
s.htm
(retrieved 2016-04-14)
De Ver Questiones Disputatae de Veritate
The Latin text is from the Leonine
Edition, and the English translation by
Robert W. Mulligan, S.J is taken from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdeVer.htm
(retrieved 2016-04-14)
De Pot Quaestiones Disputatae De Potentia Dei
The Latin text is from the Leonine Edition,
and the English translation the Fathers of
the English Dominican Province is taken
from:
http://dhspriory.org/thomas/QDdePotentia.
htm
(retrieved 2016-04-14)
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.
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 sumin the words of the Latin vulgateI
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
Gods existence but is rather trying to explain what the phrase God
exists really means. Here Thomas could be seen as arguing that, to think
Gods 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 Beingor esse, the present infinitive of the
sum in the quotation abovebecome the controlling notion for his

1 Desmond, William, God and the between, Blackwell, Malden, MA, 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.
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 existenceor, to use the more correct term6, of Being.

This thesis will argue that the account of St. Thomas that is summarized
above, amounts to an answer to the question of Beinga perennial
philosophical problematic whose formulation will be explained shortly.
This answer is a synthesis of two answers: to the philosophical question
5 One way of interpreting Aquinas use of Being as a theological concept
is in terms of Barry Millers concept of a controlling notion. In discussing
how different theologians have made use of different central concepts
that serve as a yardstick for theological reflectionGod as Perfect being
for Anselmians, God as One for those inspired by Neoplatonism, such as
MaimonidesMiller 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, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 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 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, 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
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 latters 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 historybut probably sharing some of his basic
intuition regarding this questionwe 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
the to-be to-exist debate. Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association, 82, 263274.

7 Heideggers two questions of being/Being are discussed in Section 3.1.

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 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 isas
traditionally understoodwhat gives essences their very concretization
and actualization, there is the very real danger of essentializing Being by
attempting to formulateor put into form, where form can be seen to be
cognate with morph, the Aristotelian word for essenceit 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
posedin various guisesthroughout the history of philosophy.9 Thirdly,
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, Fordham Univ. Press, New York, 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
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 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 itis 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

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.
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 withwhat arguably can be said to bea
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 atthose that adhere to the Frege-Russell-
Quine understanding of existence10would 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
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 Kants
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.
that the result of this would be a religiously vacous or even idolatrous
God of the philosophers12; others maintain that there is needed a
metaphysical reflection precisely on the 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
seekingand 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

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 has critcized the
doctrine, see Marion, Jean-Luc, God without being: hors-texte, Univ. of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1991.

13 For an excellent discussion of this view and the historical opposition

and neglect of it, see McInerny, Ralph M, Praeambula fidei: Thomism and
the God of the philosophers, Catholic University of America Press,
Washington, D.C., 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, Catholic University of America Press,
Washington, D.C., 1995.
genesis of philosophy itselfi.e. with the Presocratics15. That is not to say
that the all of the Presocratics always construed these questions in the
metaphysically proper sensethey may or may not have in particular
instancesbut 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 (arch 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 hauntedphilosophy ever since. Thus
Aristotle, building on and reacting to his teacher Platos doctrines, would
formulate the classical definition 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.
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 Aristotles 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.
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
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 beingthe
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, "Whats Wrong with the
Ontotheological Error?", Journal of Analytic Theology, Vol. 2, 2014.
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 metaphysics21, 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
Heidegger calls the ontological difference22 between Being and beings:

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.

21 Indeed, for Heidegger, this criticism applies almost universally to the

entire Western philosophical tradition, but in the present context we are
only concerned with its bearing on Aquinas.

22 This distinction has often been taken to constitute the core of

Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 latters 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,
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 Heideggers problem
history it is not of central importance for present purposes, even he
includes Aquinas in it23, seeing as we are appropriating, and transposing
Heideggers 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,24. 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.

Thomas, Making sense of Heidegger: a paradigm shift, Rowman &

Littlefield International, Lanham, Maryland, 2014, p.5.

23 For an argument to the effect that Aquinas does fall under Heideggers
criticism, see Caputo, Heidegger and Aquinas; for an argument to the
opposite effect, seeFor a contemporary non-Thomistic account that
appropriates parts of Thomas philosophy of esse but seeks to augment it
and defend it from Heideggers criticism, see Puntel, Lorenz, Being and
God

24 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.
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.

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 makesboth are unavoidable
sacrifices in a thesis of this brevityshould 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 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
Heideggers 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 thought25, 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 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.
25 To take one fitting and prominent example, we could mention Sir
Anthony Kennys excellent, Aquinas on being, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 2002.
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.26

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

26 Plato, Sophist, 244a. This translation is an old one by Benjamin Jowett

without Stephanus numbers.
Cf. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/sophist.html 244a (retrieved 2016-04-14)
This quote is found in the beginning of Heideggers BT, and is used as to
frame his retrieval of the question of Being.
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 Heideggers own question of Being.

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 reasons27. Heideggers distinction is more accurately described

27 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 Englishas 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,
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 Heideggers

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 beingSeienden als Seienden).28 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 Beingthis is the real question of
Being for Heidegger and it comes close towhile 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 difference29. 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 beings; will illustrate the problematic further:
Insofar as Being constitutes what is asked about, and insofar as Being

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.: 25987

28 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.

29 The phrase itself is only written out in the footnotes of BT, but its
meaning constitutes its main thematic.
means the Being of beings, beings themselves turn out to be what is
interrogated in the question of Being.30 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 simplisticbetween 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 existentiell31 way, engaged with the world around
her; thus we have his definition of the human Dasein as being-in-the-
world.

30 BT, 5.

31 A neologism of Heidegger that signifies that the word is used in the

ontic sense of historical
All of this has taken us some way from the topic at hand, but without
some mentioning of Heideggers 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 Aquinas32 in so far as as his gnoseology33
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 world34. This, of course, goes some
way to explain the different conditions under which Heidegger and
Aquinas respectively approached the question of Being/beings.

32 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 Bernard Lonergan, Insight: a study of
human understandning

33 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.

34 Being and essence is what is first conceived by the intellect[];

ens autem et essentia sunt quae primo intellectu concipiuntur. Cf. De
ente, proeemium / 1.
We will here limit our discussion of Heideggers views to these brief
considerations. As mentioned, our intention is not to reproduce his
Heideggers 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 Heideggers 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 Heideggers
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 Heideggers work
Nietzsche, and its translation into English is a matter of some dispute35,
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 Puntels 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 formulation of the distinction between
Being and beings; this presupposes the splitting of the expression into

35 Cf. Emad, Parvis, Translation and interpretation: learning from

Beitrge, Zeta books, Bucharest, 2012, 81-83
two component parts: Being as such and Being as a whole36; (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 Puntels 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 Sein37, and in Sein und
36 According to our practice of spelling the non-absolute beings at the far
end of the ontological difference with a lowercase, and since

37 Puntel, Lorenz, Struktur und Sein. Ein Theorierahmen fr eine

systematische Philosophie. Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck Verlag, 2006. For the
present thesis, I have consulted the English translation, Structure and
Gott38; 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
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 ontologicaland 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 Beingas Being is
distinct from beings; as well as a unitive aspect of Beingboth 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 Puntels distinction to carry

the fully determinate meaning that it does in the context of his
philosophy, but like the previously elaborated distinctions, we have
Being: A Theoretical Framework for a Systematic Philosophy; translated
by and in collaboration with Alan White, University Park, Pa. :
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2008.

38 Puntel, Lorenz, Sein und Gott : ein systematischer Ansatz in

Auseinandersetzung mit M. Heidegger, E. Lvinas und J.-L. Marion.
Tbingen : 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.
introduced both the expression Being as such and as a wholeand the
possible distinction that can be made out of itand Puntels 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 metaphysics39, 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: namely of
grounding the object of metaphysicsbeing as beingin, what we would
call, natural theology, which attains Being as such40. The procedure of this
natural theology is explored in Section 5.1. Secondly, with regard to the

39 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.
different formulations of the ontological difference, a translation of them
into the terminology of the Thomist framework is possible in the following
ways41: 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 Godand 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 being42; John Wippel (b.1933)
speaks of finite being and uncreated being43. 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,)44 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.

40 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.

41 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.

42 See especially Lonergan, Insight, pp. 657-752(ch. 19-20.)

43 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.

44 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.
Now, again it must be stressed that we are not comparing or imposing the
specifics of Heideggers 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.

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
metaphysics45: the distinction between Being and essence.

Firstly then, there is the distinction made by Aristotleand integrated in

Thomas systembetween 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

45 Wippel, John F. Metaphysical themes in Thomas Aquinas II,

Washington, D.C., Catholic University of America Press, 2007, 9.
Parmenidean/Heraclitean problematic of identity/permanence versus
change46or its related problem: unity versus plurality, i.e. the one and
the many. The problem had already been tackled by Aristotles mentor
Plato by the postulation of the theory of forms, whichaccording to
conventional wisdomrelegated 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)47. 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
potentially48 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.49; as well as the
transcendental character of goodness: [] therefore we may also say
46 Cfr. Feser, Edward, Scholastic metaphysics: a contemporary
introduction, Ontos, Frankfurt, 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, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Indiana,
2001, ch.5-6

47 These terms are gradually presented in the Metaphysics, and is

explicitly the subject of Book IX: Theta, of the same work.

48 Aristotle, Metaphysics, IX, 8.

that in the things which are from the beginning, i.e. in eternal things,
there is nothing bad.50 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 Avicenna51: 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 actuality52.
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 thingor substancethen, 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, whichhere we are back into the dangerous waters of
attempting to say just what Being isconcretizes 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 beingsor rather, is what
makes or generates this structure in so far as it is something real and
concreteand 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

49 Ibid, IX, 8.

50 Ibid, IX, 9.

51 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 Aquinass Metaphysics in Wippel, Metaphysical
themes, 31-64.

52 Feser, Scholastic metaphysics, 267-268.

using his termthe 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.

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,53

53 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
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 attributesor lack of attributesof
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 Gods
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:

Of these ways the first is as follows. Everything that is moved is

moved by another. That some things are in motionfor example, the
sunis 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 conclusionnamely, 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

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.
 proceed to infinity. Hence, we must posit some prime unmoved
mover.54

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)55 in a substance from
potency to actuality: what is moved must have a potentiality to move, and
motion is the actualizing of this potentiality56. 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

54 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.

55 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.

56 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
conceptsnotions 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, Aldershot,
Hants, England ; Burlington, VT : Ashgate, 2006.
which is the end of the motion.57 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
spontaneity58. 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 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 moverthe 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.59

The way Thomas begins the investigation of the properties of God60 is by

what he calls the way of remotion (via remotionis). Remotion in this
57 Velde, Aquinas on God, 56.

58 Ibid, 58.

59 SCG I, 14, 1.
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 reality61. 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."62Thomas 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.63 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 junctures in this procedure;
we will see how the distinctions between act/potency, and between
Being/essence are ingeniously utilized in Aquinas deductions.

60 In so far as Aquinas reasoning is meant to model a process by which

natural reason can come to know God as cause through Gods 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
University Press, Oxford, 2001.

61 In the sense that we can take the property of temporality, and by

adding the alpha privative to get atemporality, we getin Aquinas
definitioneternity. Negative theology would be one conventional
definition of this procedure.

62 SCG I, 14, 2.

63 Ibid, 3.
The starting pointor "principle"of Thomas' way of remotion towards
knowledge of God is the property of the first cause as unmovedwhich 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 timea category that is defined
by motion and potentialitythus 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 Gods Being and essence are the sameGod 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-existing64, or self-sufficient, absolutely
transcendent status of the latter in contradistinction to 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)65 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
64 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, Identitt 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.

65 For example in Aquinas Compendium theologiae, ch. 15.

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.66

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.67

66 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.

67 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
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 participation68: 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

Aquinian vision of God/Being that we have tried to articulate in these

paragraphs, maintains this distance.

68 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.
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 perfection69 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 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[]70

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

69 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.

70 De pot, q. 7, a. 2, ad. 9.
grounded in God/Being itself71. Aquinas God as ipsum esse, Being itself,
is thus identified with the universal perfection of Being (perfectio
essendi), which indeterminatelybecause simply and infinitelycontains
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 beings
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

71 The above quote doesnt mention divine esse, but its context is
specifically a discussion of the identification of God with Being itself in
the familiar form of That Gods 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.
esse according to Aquinas, who never misses a chance to make an
interesting distinction; thus he makes, for example, the 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.72 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].73

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

72 For a much more detailed exposition of this, see Wippel, Metaphysical

thought, 94-131.

73 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.
concept of existenceat least as this is ordinarily understood74for a
thing either exists or it doesnt; 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 differenceall
the beings that make up the Universe, on the one hand, and their
primordial ground in Being itself on the otherthere 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.

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.75

[] every putatively meaningful theological affirmation

dangles upon a golden but fragile thread of analogy76.

This subsection will give an account of Aquinas doctrine of analogy:

specifically of analogical predication (praedicatione analogica), as a way
of expressing the diverse meanings of beings, of the analogy of (divine)
nomination (analogia nominum), as a way of speaking intelligibly but

74 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.

75 Plato, Timaeus 31b-32a

76 David Bentley Hart, God, Creation, and Evil: The Moral Meaning of
creatio ex nihilo, Radical Orthodoxy: Theology, Philosophy, Politics, Vol.
3, 2015.
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)77. When thus discussing the need for, and purpose
of analogy we are back to the problematic of the one and the manyto
unity and difference, identity and permanceas resolved by Aquinas78
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.

We will of course be limited to giving only a rough exposition of these

concepts, with the purpose of illuminating the overall thematic of the
investigation. We will introduce the concept of analogy with a few words
on its ancient Greek background.79

The concept of analogy itself is arguably as ancient as the Presocratics,

having as its original meaning a geometric-mathematical
proportionality80(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

77 With respect to the analogy of being, this is more of a systematic

interpretation of Aquinas rather than a fully developed theory on his part,
but it is sufficiently established to merit consideration in the present
context. Cf. Analogia entis

78 This should not be taken as claiming that it was Aquinas unique

contribution that he permanently or originally resolved this problematic,
but simpy states that the latter has framework for resolving it.

79 The connections between these different ancient Greek thinkers and

Aquinas are covered in an accessible way in Rocca

80 I.e. the ratio of x-y

be Aristotles definition of analogical predication as an alternative to
equivocal predicationfor example, in explaining how the virtues are all
good but yet are not good in the same way.

As already intimated, 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
priority of Being, represent its Platonic elements; the doctrine of analogy
can be seen as a reductio ad unum of the two: 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 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 principle81 for Aquinas thought.

The importance of analogy arises on two different levels82 for Aquinas: the
predicamental (as in Aristotle) and the vertical/transcendental/ontological
(harkening back to Plato and Neoplatonism). Predicamental analogy

Divine nomination: Safeguarding the transcendence and indeterminacy of

God

Now, while the notion of an analogy of being is what, allows 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.

81 Cf. Przywara, 396

82 nts: (Wippel, MT, 73-74)

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