The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being.

McDermott, John M.

THE METAPHYSICAL THOUGHT OF THOMAS AQUINAS: FROM FINITE BEING TO UNCREATED BEING. By John F. Wippel. Washington: Catholic University of America, 2000. Pp. xxvii + 630. $39.95.

Wippel examines the major themes of metaphysics: being and non-being, matter and form, potency and act, substance and accident, distinction and individuation, supposite and participation, God's existence and analogy. He also develops a rational psychology and treats the knowledge-faith relation. Nonetheless, this is not Everyman's Introduction to Thomism. The laborious reading required of this text, as W. traces the development of Thomas's positions through various texts with copious and strictly argued paraphrases, would daunt any philosophical novice. There is much repetition as W. points out constants and changes; yet his remarks are generally careful and acute. The reader is challenged and learns. With the book's heavy concentration on textual analysis in chronological sequence, one might be tempted to consign it to medieval scholars studying various aspects of Thomas's doctrine. But the chapters are not isolated historical studies; they compose a unified metaphysical vision.

Though W. is bound to Thomas's text, his metaphysics determines the choice of texts studied, their interpretation, and judgments about the success of Thomas's arguments. Fundamentally W.'s Thomas is an Aristotelian, deriving all knowledge from the senses. Surely there is an existential deepening; metaphysical knowledge occurs only with a separatio, or negative judgment; multiple texts on participation cannot be ignored; and the analogy of proportion, the analogy of one to another, is considered fundamental (Thomas employed proportionality only fleetingly in the De veritate). That act is not self-limiting but must be limited by a receptive principle, provides the basic structural principle in both essential and existential orders.

This thick-essence Thomism lays the foundation for the interpretation of Thomas's proofs for God's existence: insofar as the five ways rely on efficient causality, they are valid; the other elements are not probative, and even the fifth way makes sense only if finality is understood as the intention of the creative, efficient Cause. (As external causes, efficient causes correspond to the clear distinctions provided by Aristotelian abstraction, and such a distinguishing defines the God-world relation, even in the causality of freedom.)

Somewhat unusual may be W.'s insistence that in analogous predication there is no single intelligible content (ratio) common to all acts of existence, certainly not to God's infinite esse and the creature's finite esse. But if esse is most actual, this irreducibility of esse to any finite intelligibility threatens the unity of knowing. If all concepts of essences are grounded in a concept of being without a single ratio, can any unity be discovered for their distinctive rationes? Since God's perfections are one with His being, the common ratio in all pure perfections, realized in creatures and applied to God, must likewise be denied. Admittedly the opposite danger consists in reducing being's analogy to univocity--a very difficult problem that no one has resolved. Perhaps W.'s Aristotelian Thomism veers toward Przywara's Schwebe: analogy involves an oscillation between sameness and difference, finite and infinite, transcendence and immanence.

This intelligent, challenging book confronts various problems on which Thomas wavered: e.g., is the quantity of signed matter responsible for individuality determinate or indeterminate? But has sufficient attention been given to Thomas's neo-Platonic heritage? Only one text about the natural desire to see God's essence receives a very transitory mention (533). After Hankey's God in Himself (1987) the Summa theologiae's overall (neo-Platonic) structure cannot be ignored: Broadly characterized, Thomas is horizontally Aristotelian, vertically Dionysian. Does not Thomas allow for the soul's self-awareness not mediated by reflection on a previous act of knowledge (cf. ST 1, q. 76, a. 1 c; q. 87, a. 1 c)? The emanation of the faculties from the soul's essence involves a resultatio, not a transmutatio, i.e., an efficient cause (ST 1, q. 77, a. 6, ad 3; q. 7, a. 7, ad 1; cf. 1, q. 61, a. 1 c; 1-2, q. 18, a. 2, ad 3; despite W. 271-75). Does not the innate desire for happiness, known confusedly but naturally, indicate God's existence (ST 1, q. 2, a. 1, ad 1)? Would not such a neo-Platonic emphasis revivify the finality of the fourth way? And how does the concept of being result from the metaphysical separatio? If the prephilosophical judgment of facticity does not attain metaphysical being, how can metaphysical being be drawn out by a reflection on the common sense's phantasm? It is not clear how beings participate in esse commune, if esse commune "does not exist as such apart from individual existents, except in the order of thought" (121). Beings are also said to participate in God's esse (176-77). How is esse commune related to (psum esse subsistens? W. may want to avoid having all creatures participate directly in God's esse despite omne agens agit sibi simile--a participation in the divine nature (esse) is grace--but how can there be any participation in something that enjoys no single ratio and does not exist separately? A thought esse cannot supply the basis for a real participation.

A good book, but Thomists still have questions to discuss.

Pontifical College Josephinum, Columbus, Ohio
JOHN M.
MCDERMOTT, S.J.