International Catholic University
A being is that which exists, a thing that has existence. Existence is the ultimate actuality of the thing. But while existence enters into our account of being, of any being, existence is not of the nature of the existent thing. If it were, the thing would exist necessarily.
That is, if something existed in virtue of what it is, it would exist necessarily, essentially.
What a thing is, its essence, is expressed in its definition, the account we give of it. If existence is not part of that account, part of what the thing is, a being is composed of essence and existence. A being is a thing that has existence.
In the material substance, what is actual in it, is its form. Is its form existence?
Form is rather the measure of existence, that which characterizes as this kind of existing rather than that.
We have seen that things are said to be in many ways. There is a great difference between being a substance and being an accident.
Socrates is pale.
Socrates is a man.
To be pale is an example of incidental or accidental existence; to be human an example of substantial existence. Obviously, the former presupposes the latter.
The infinitive 'to be' is restricted both by the subject and the predicate of the above statements. S is P.
When we say of something that it exists, X exists, we cannot specify what 'exists' means until we know the value of the variable.
Existence is either substantial or accidental.
"To be and that which is are different. For to be itself is not yet, but that which is, having received a form of being, is and subsists." -- Boethius
"Existence is the act of every actuality, even of form."
* For a material substance to exist is for its form actually to inhere in its matter.
Vivere est esse viventibus.
For a living thing, to be is to live. Esse substantiale.
* for a separated substance to exist is for a form to subsist. Angels are subsistent forms. They are kinds of existent, and their actuality is measured by and characterized by their essence or nature.
But existence is not of their nature. They are not necessary existents in that sense.
[Material substances have the intrinsic possibility of their not being in the matter which is in potency to forms other than the one actuating the matter. There is no such principle in angels: they are incorruptible. In that sense they are necessary: they cannot cease to be by corrupting.]
The angelic essence is as potency to the act of existence. It remains always dependent on the divine causality.
* if angels, however perfect, represent modes of existing, ways of being, they do not exhaust being or existence as such. If God is not a limited being, if God is wholly necessary, we can characterize him as subsisting existence. Ipsum esse subsistens.
This is Thomas's name for God.
"He who is is the most proper name of God both because of that from which it is imposed, namely existence, and because of its mode of signifying and consignifying." -- Thomas Aquinas
The only way we can talk of God, the only way he can talk to us, is by using words which first mean creatures.
The great drama of metaphysics may be described as the painstaking effort to devise a less inadequate language to speak of God. Prior to metaphysics, Aristotle had become aware of God as the prime mover. In Book 12 of the Metaphysics, he describes God as Thought Thinking Itself.
Thinking is an immaterial activity, Aristotle had proved in On the Soul. But our thinking is dependent on experience, our ideas are abstractions from the images we form of physical things. In reflecting on how we know physical objects, we become aware that our thinking is not just another physical process.
If thinking is to be attributed to God, we will want to make the thinking he is independent of other things, as if they caused his ideas. Thought Thinking Itself, like Ipsum Esse Subsistens, is a supreme effort to name God without attributing to him what is proper to his effects, to creatures.
In speaking of the subject of metaphysics, Aristotle drew our attention to the way the term 'healthy' is shared by Pluto, dog food and a wet nose. The term does not have one meaning in all those uses, nor does it have utterly different meanings, but rather a graded set, one of which meanings is controlling of the others.
Thomas makes use of this same example when he asks how names can be common to God and creature.
Socrates is wise.
God is wise.
Is 'wise' univocal? Well, wisdom is something Socrates achieved and he could lose it. That is not true of God's wisdom. So the term cannot mean exactly the same thing. Nor is it purely equivocal. How can it be shown to be analogous?
The various meanings of healthy were seen to involve the same denominating form, health. So too we can say that the term wise invokes wisdom as its denominating form.
In the case of healthy, there was a kind of completable form ______ health. So we can think of wise as involving the completable form ______ wisdom.
Subject of, sign, of, cause of . . . .
What will fill in the blank in the case of wise? We can fill in the blank as the term applies to Socrates. But in the case of God, we say, he isn't wise in that way. Rather he has wisdom in an eminent way.
The movement from affirmation, through negation, to the eminent and sublime way in which God has -- indeed is -- the perfection of the denominating form, characterizes our efforts to name God.
The very plurality of divine names tells us two things:
Thomas thus returns to Ipsum esse subsistens == this is the least imperfect name of God because it does not suggest any limitation on existence.
"To be consonant with the word of God, philosophy needs first of all to recover its sapiential dimension as a search for the ultimate and overarching meaning of life. -- John Paul II
The Christian believer who looks at what philosophers manage to say about God will find it a meager result. He might be tempted to be disdainful of it. How little it is when compared with the richness of revelation.
Thomas rather marveled at what human reason unaided by revelation was able to achieve.
Fides et Ratio suggests that we would do well to emulate Thomas's attitude. In our time, the Church comes to the defense of reason in the course of defending and proclaiming the faith. The Holy Father is astonished at the disparagement of reason that is widespread today.
He sees a pervasive relativism and nihilism, a shrinking from the metaphysical range of philosophy and a retreat into a cramped and cramping skepticism.
It is essential that the Faith be seen in relation to reason.
The two poles to be avoided are Naturalism and Fideism.
But, if the Pope is right, there is little danger of Naturalism in the older sense. If the Pope is right there is such skepticism about knowledge that the charge is more likely to be: nothing can be known of God because nothing can be known of anything.
Hence the need to insist upon the range and capacity of reason.
Only a robust sense of reason and its range provides us with the necessary point of reference to show how much more the faith is, how different it is from the knowledge of philosophy.
A robust philosophy will culminate in wisdom, in theology.
And that theology will always be a knowledge of God that is painstaking erected on knowledge of creatures.
But there is another theology, another divine science, one that has God as its subject because it is a sharing of the knowledge that God has of himself.
I turn in the end to the woman whom the prayer of the Church invokes as the Seat of Wisdom, and whose life itself is a true parable illuminating the reflection contained in these pages. For between the vocation of the Blessed Virgin and the vocation of true philosophy there is a deep harmony. Just as the Virgin was called to offer herself entirely as a human being and as a woman that God's Word might take flesh and come among us, so too philosophy is called to offer its rational and critical resources that theology, as the understanding of faith, may be fruitful and creative. And just as in giving her assent to Gabriel's word, Mary lost nothing of her true humanity and freedom, so too when philosophy heeds the summons of the Gospel's truth its authority is in no way impaired . . . Indeed, it is then that philosophy sees all its enquiries rise to their highest expression. This was a truth which the holy monks of antiquity understood well when they called Mary 'the table at which faith sits in thought.' In her they saw a lucid image of true philosophy and they were convinced of the need to philosophari in Maria.
One who has spent his life philosophizing at Notre Dame easily responds to the admonition that he philosophize in Mary.
October 20, 1998