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CHAPTER 2
WESTERN PHILOSOPHY (1)
SAINT THOMAS
INTRODUCTION
THE HORIZON OF NOTHINGNESS
Western Metaphysics aligns its problem on a line apparently very similar to the Greek world. This world, above all Aristotle, has spoken to us about first philosophy (proté philosophía) as a theoría, that is to say, as a lógos of the theós. We already mentioned something with respect to what the theós is for Aristotle; now we must make this more precise.
Aristotle considers the theós as an ousía, as something that is fully self-sufficient. All realities in some form or another are sufficient, i.e., they are self-contained, and in this sense they are ousía. But this special ousía, the theós, has an absolutely full sufficiency and independence. The theós of Aristotle is purely and simply an ousía that is completely self-sufficient and needs no other to occur and attain being (Sp. ser). In this sense it is péras, something perfectly determined. As such, the theós is quite removed from what for us will be the infinitude. About this substance Aristotle will say that {72} it is akíneton, immutable, or if you will, unmovable. It is such not only in fact, but also by its internal condition. It is immutable because in itself it is pure actuality, pure act, and that means for Aristotle that God is a pure subsisting “form”, with no matter at all. Not only does not need another in order to be, but in addition he is self-sufficient in terms of the fullness of his operations.
Aristotle provides the theós with an intelligence and a will, but with an intelligence and a will that are fully self-sufficient. Precisely because of this, they lack an object different from themselves. For Aristotle the reality of the world is not knowable to God; he did not even think of this problem, because in that case God would depend on the reality he knows. The intelligence and the will that Aristotle assigns to the theós as the root and supreme reason of his internal sufficiency do nothing but think and desire themselves, intellection of intellection (nóesis noéseas). In this autosufficiency is what Aristotle makes the perfect volitive happiness of that being, which God is consist.
Consequently, there is nothing here that would make us think immediately in what is going to be in western philosophy the idea of an infinite God; that is something absolutely alien to the Greek world. The theós of Aristotle is something perfectly determined by its internal, by its formal and full sufficiency, in the sense that he does not need of another to be, not even to perform his operations.
This being that the divine ousía is, has been considered from the perspective of motion. So much so, that when Aristotle tells us what that first substance is he says it is unmoved (akíneton), that it is the first unmoved mover. This God thinks about himself and loves himself; but Aristotle is far from imagining {73} that this internal knowledge of himself and that volition of himself may have any semblance with what in western philosophy will be the reflexivity. Aristotle makes of the divine intellect an “object” of his own intellection and everything ends there. He does not raise the question of the way in which intellection may return upon itself, a thought completely alien to Aristotle. God is only concerned with himself, just as we men are concerned with ourselves, and to a certain extent with the rest.
This determines his relationship with the world. From the point of view of God, this relationship is nil; the theós of Aristotle has no relationship with the world. Not only in himself is he unmoved (akíneton), but he is purely and simply something that places the world in motion (próton kinoûn); correctly understanding that, in the first place, this God has not made the world, since he is something that is just there absolutely. In the second place, not only has he not made the world as efficient cause, but also he has not put it in motion as efficient cause. Cosmic motions emerge from the proper characteristics of the substances that compose the world, of their ousíai, and do not depend at all on a divine action. The only thing this unmoved mover does is to put the world in motion by evoking it. As the perfect substance he is —here there is probably a vague Platonic resonance inside the Aristotelian metaphysics—, from the part of things there is a certain desire (órexis), not a desire to go towards God, but a desire to be in motion. For this reason, if God puts the world in motion it is similar to the object of love that puts the lover in motion and draws out the desire, without the loved object being altered at all.
And thus, facing this God of the Greek, western metaphysics {74} inscribes its thought in a completely different horizon. It will be easy to repeat the term “theology” and translate theós by Deus. But what lies behind these terms and concepts is something abysmally different and alien to what Greek thought was.
Above all, God, considered in himself prior to any metaphysics, is conceived by the whole of western theology as an existing reality by itself certainly, but endowed with a personal characteristic, an idea completely alien to the Greek world. Not only is he personal, but the sufficiency of that person does not reside in self-knowledge, but just the opposite, it knows itself by the intrinsic infinitude in which this divine being consists. Because of this, while for Aristotle God is something susceptible of admitting “replicas”, polytheism is completely excluded from western thought. In the beginning, Aristotle thought that the first unmoved mover was only one, and due to that singularity he repeats the famous Homeric verse, “It is not good to have many sovereigns, let one be the ruler”1. Somewhat later, probably because of the influence of astronomy, which was then being elaborated in Greece, Aristotle assigns to the different forty-seven astronomical circles a similar number of unmoved movers. Just as the sphere of Parmenides was capable of being replicated in the atoms of Democritus, the theós of Aristotle could be replicated in a series of forty-seven unmoved movers because he lacked that characteristic, which excludes any multiplication, that intrinsic infinitude proper to the God of Christianity.
But also the relationship between God and the world is totally different in western metaphysics from the one {75} that the Greek world was able to imagine. Precisely as a fact of faith western metaphysics has always believed that God has created the world out of nothing.
It is true that the two concepts of creation and nothingness may be somewhat fluid at many points. Actually, the verb bârâ in Hebrew, which appears in the first line of Genesis—”In the beginning God created heavens and earth”— does not etymologically mean “to create”, but “to make”; the proof is that the Septuagint sometimes translated this by “made” (epoíesen). However, it is true that the semantic use of this term in all the Old Testament has the meaning of a creative action, and for that reason it is properly translated when it says, “”In the beginning God created heavens and earth”.
This idea of creation is still susceptible to several interpretations. One interpretation, if you will, more popular, is the one that appears in the second chapter of Genesis and presents God somewhat like a potter who is making man with earthen clay. However, we must keep in mind that the first chapter of Genesis was written many centuries after the second chapter; the first chapter belongs to the exilic or postexilic era, while the second proceeds from the Yahwist tradition that was fixated in writing probably in the IX century before Christ. Therefore, this appeal to the potter is out of the question at this point. However, the affirmation that creation is a “creation out of nothing” appears for the first time in the Book of Maccabees (2 Mc 7:28), which says, “from things that are not” (ouk ex ónton) God has created. The important point is not only that this phrase is in the Book of Maccabees, but that it is placed on the mouth of a woman of the people, which means more or less that it was a common belief among all Israelites of that time.
{76} To create the world out of nothing means, in the first place, that something is produced that was not there before, ex nihilo sui; otherwise, there would have been no production and this is something that happens to all of us on earth that make something. Something is made inasmuch as it was not made before, and therefore, something appears that is ex nihilo sui. But what is proper to creation is to be ex nihilo sui et subjecti, because in the end all the productions and creations we witnesses in the world are always productions that operate on something already existing, on a primary subject. Consequently, all these creations, regardless how profound they may be, are always “alterations”. That is why I have sometimes thought that the formula that best translates the idea of creation would be to say that it is, from the part of God, the placing of otherness without alteration. Places the other, but without alteration, neither on his part nor on the part of the subject that receives it; that is the pure and simple placing of the other insofar as other. Which shows that the relationship of God to the world is completely different than the one thought out by Greek metaphysics.
God, precisely as creator ex nihilo, is the first efficient cause of the whole reality of the world. But is at the same time the last final cause. In his double aspect of efficient and final causality, the creative action is a fact of faith that as such has nothing to do with what constituted Greek metaphysics. This has a decisive importance for the horizon in which the history of metaphysics is going to be inscribed from that moment until our time. For a Greek, to be would mean in the end “to truly be”, that is to say, “to be always”, to be more or less incorruptible in one way or the other, at least during a certain period of time even though it may be segmentary and fragmentary. For Greek men the world begins by being something whose internal vicissitudes and internal structure man tries to study. Now, on the other hand, {77} the first thing we think about things —and reasonably so— is that they might not have been, i.e., they might have been nothing. There appears, then, next to the horizon of motion of the Greek world, the horizon of nothingness.
The first thing that western metaphysics thinks is that the world, whatever it is, might not have been or could have been different from what it is. It follows that being does not mean being-always, as the Greek thought, but being not-nothing, that is, created being. That moment of “not-nothing” is going to constitute, for better or for worse, the horizon in which is going to be inscribed western metaphysics from the beginnings of Christianity. Therefore, man is not, as it was for a Greek, an entity that with his lógos is going to say what things are, but primarily and radically is a traveler between the almost-nothing, which man is, and God, the full reality. This idea of traveler between the world and God is what St. Bonaventure expressed in his famous treatise, brief but full of metaphysical substance, Itinerarium mentis in Deo, an itinerary of the mind towards God. This horizon and this vision actually have nothing to do with metaphysics, it is a strictly theologic vision or, at least, theological. Its theologic version in the sense of lógos was the object of the first Greek and Latin speculations, something that does not concern us now because we are unraveling the structure of some metaphysics.
Within this theologic horizon is where Greek ideas are going to be received, and the organon of concepts they bequeath to us is going to be used to understand and make intelligible not only God, but also things within the horizon of nothingness. Instead of presenting its history we shall concentrate this metaphysical vision on St. Thomas.
St. Thomas receives the ideas of the metaphysics of Aristotle {78} and does with them a smaller version of what Aristotle did with his ancestors. Above all, he purifies and sharpens the concepts received from Aristotle with extreme neatness and pulchritude. But it would be a mistake to stop there, as if St. Thomas thought that metaphysics was already there. The metaphysics of St. Thomas is not there, but begins there when with that organon of concepts he is going to interpret what entity is within the horizon of nothingness. We have, therefore, two points, first the purification of Aristotle by St. Thomas, and second, the Thomist view of entity. We shall start with the first.
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§ 1
THE PURIFICATION
OF ARISTOTELIAN CONCEPTS
We ask, first of all, in what does this purifying reception of concepts from the metaphysics of Aristotle consist for St. Thomas?
This purification can be observed on two precise points. In the first place, the idea St. Thomas has of what metaphysics is. In the second place, the idea St. Thomas has of the proper object of metaphysics.
I. The idea of philosophy as metaphysics
We have seen that the metaphysics of Aristotle —it is well known he never called it “metaphysics”— or, if you will, the first philosophy of Aristotle, on the one hand was the science of entity as such (ón e ón) and, on the other hand, was “theology”. On this duplicity much has been written, I tend to believe that Aristotle thought that precisely the theós was the supreme substance and a knowledge can always be qualified a potiori by that which constitutes its sublime terminus. But, regardless of whether this is the solution of the problem, the fact is that the duality of concepts is present in Aristotle.
Aristotle would tell us, in the first place, that precisely as “theology” metaphysics aims towards these separated substances (choristé ousía), which the gods (theós) are or the God, if we refer to the single unmoved mover he initially admitted. In the second place, with respect to things he tries {80} to find out what they are insofar as they are. In the third place, about those things, insofar as they are, he tries to find their reasons and ultimate causes.
In the first page of the commentary that St. Thomas wrote to the Metaphysics of Aristotle, he literally says, “According to these three perspectives three names appear”. An important commentary follows, “It is called divine science or theology insofar as it deals with the separated substances”2, and this would seem to suggest that St. Thomas does nothing but repeat what Aristotle had said about the theós. But here is where the important inflexion of thought begins, because that separated substance of which St. Thomas thinks is not the theós of Aristotle, but the God, personal and infinite, that is certainly “separated” from the world. And it is to Him to whom St. Thomas refers the Aristotelian definition of “theology” as logos of that God. Hence, that “theology” is a science that refers to God insofar as object of religious acts; the theology in which St. Thomas is going to inscribe his idea of God —the separated substances of Aristotle— is a theological and religious vision of the world. No one would think of praying to the first unmoved mover; on the other hand, the supplication (euché) is directly addressed to this God, separated substance (I do not insist now on the adverb) that for St. Thomas constitutes the God of Christianity. The difference is considerable.
In the second place, in just a few words St. Thomas expresses the second concept, “It is called metaphysics inasmuch as that science considers entity and everything that follows from it”3. Here {81} it seems, St. Thomas just repeats the Aristotelian formula, but in this same chapter we shall also see important inflexions. Because “the entity” about which St. Thomas writes as in first place is entity, which for Aristotle is not really first, where, as we have seen, ón strictly speaking is not properly translated by “entity”. I will not say that in many cases this may not be true. But, when Aristotle says tó ón légatai pollachôs, “which is said in many ways”4, Aristotle is not thinking about entity, but in that we express when the logos says of something “that it is”, and this is said in many (in four) senses. But we might think, at least in the sense of the categories, the ón means an “entity”; we shall see that even this is not completely accurate.
Continuing with the explanation of this second concept of metaphysics, St. Thomas says, “This trans-physics is found, by way of resolution and conceptual analysis, as the more common is known after the less common”5. Here, there is an important inflexion with respect to the Aristotelian thought. For Aristotle, what we call “metaphysics” was purely and simply “first philosophy”, with respect to which the investigation of nature, for example, is second philosophy (deútera philosophía). The subject is completely different, so different that the editor of the works of Aristotle found some writings placed right after the Physics and not having a title called them, “What comes after Physics” (metà tà physiká). St. Thomas does not even take this circumstance into consideration and tells us directly that the characteristics of entity as such are “transphysical”, where {82} “trans” does not mean they come after the Physics, but in one form or another are “beyond” Physics and transcend it. We shall have to see in what sense St. Thomas affirms this; but what cannot be done is to simply unload that term on the text of Aristotle because the translation of metà by trans is going to be decisive in the history of western metaphysics. While metaphysics in the hands of Aristotle was a “first philosophy”, here first philosophy is called “metaphysics” because it studies something that certainly belongs to all things, but in one way or another is “trans” of them, beyond them. That is why, although this may not be the most usual expression in St. Thomas, it will have to be taken as an identification in the sense that the transcendental is what defines the metaphysical.
St. Thomas has added something further in this commentary. While entity, the ón e ón is for Aristotle a characteristic that all things have by the mere fact that they are, because they form that compact unit we call the world or the cosmos, here something different appears. Those characteristics, let us call them “entifying” to simplify the exposition, appear as belonging to a very especial type, as the most common, the most common universal characteristics that all things have. Here the kathólou of Aristotle acquires the very concrete sense of universality, the one that fits everything by the mere fact of being, and thus has become magis communis.
St. Thomas provides a third conception of first philosophy by telling us “it is said that it is first philosophy inasmuch as it considers the first causes of everything”6. {83} Since this first cause is the Creator God for St. Thomas, it means that insofar as theology and insofar as transphysical, first philosophy —what St. Thomas simply calls metaphysics— is converted into metaphysical theology of creation.
For Aristotle metaphysics was, on the one hand, the investigation of entity as such (ón e ón), and on the other, it was “theology”. In St. Thomas both concepts appear unified because he will tell us —and certainly this he could not have taken from Aristotle— that entity insofar as entity has God as a first cause. Consequently, here we are not facing a denomination a potiori as it happened in Aristotle, but forms part of the internal context of the metaphysics of St. Thomas.
In summary, the interpretation of the metà as trans and having converted “meta-physics” into “trans-physics” shapes the conceptual depuration that St. Thomas works on the “first philosophy” of Aristotle. But much more important are the purifications St. Thomas is going to elaborate on the very object of that metaphysics.
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1 Met L 1076 a 4, Oúk agathón polukoiraníe eís koiranós.
2 “Secundum igitur tria praedicta [...] sortitur tria nomina. Dicitur enim scientia divina sive theologia inquantum praedictas substantias [sc. separatas] considerat”, In Met., proem.
3 “[Dicitur] Metaphysica, in quantum considerat ens et ea quae consequuntur ipsum”, Ibid.
4 Met Z 1028 a 10.
5 “Haec enim transphysica inveniuntur in via resolutionis, sicut magis communia post minus communia”, Ibid.
6 “Dicitur autem prima philosophia, inquantum primas rerum causas considerat”, Ibid.