Chapter VI , The Universe of St. Thomas
These philosophers observed that every corporeal being is formed from two elements, matter and form. Like their predecessors, neither Plato nor Aristotle questioned the origin of matter. So far as they were concerned, it was without cause. As for the forms of things, however, they assigned them an origin. According to Plato, substantial forms came from the Ideas. According to Aristotle, Ideas were not enough to explain the generation of new substances continually observed in experience. (p. 130)
After Plato and Aristotle, then, there remained a last possible advance: to assign the ultimate cause of the total being, of its matter, its form, its accidents. In other words, it is not enough to show why it is this being and why it is such and such a being, but it must also be shown why it is “being.” When we ask why beings exist as such, matter and form and accidents included, there is but one possible answer—God's creative act. When it has arrived at this point, the human reason has exhausted the question to its limit and the problem of the basic root of being is resolved.
This text alone would justify our concluding that in St. Thomas's eyes, Aristotle's doctrine did not completely solve the problem of being. If we only think what an infinite distance lies between a God who is a creator and one who is not a creator, we can conclude that St. Thomas saw his God as very different from Aritsotle's. St. Thomas pointed out this weakness of Aristotelianism as one of the capital errors opposed to the articles of the Christian faith. (p. 131)
To be sure of ourselves, we should have to know to what extent St. Thomas was aware that he was an innovator in disengaging the existential character of being far better than his predecessors had done. We should have to know how conscious he was that he was an innovator in relation to men like St. Augustine and Dionysius the Areopagite whose authority in the Church was so enormous. But we do not know all this. Let us be content, then, at our own risk, to point out a number of differences in doctrine in which St. Thomas himself undoubtedly saw but different formulations of one and the same truth. (p. 132)
Setting out form this principle, Augustine seems to have met no grave difficulty in resolving the problem of the divine names. Whatever unity, order, intelligibility and beauty is to be found in nature provided him with a basis for as many attributes of God. To do this, he had only to carry each positive good to its highest perfection and to attribute it to God under this form, adding that what we learn as a host of distinct attributes are, in God, identical with His being. “God is what He possesses” is St. Augustine's oft-repeated formula, whose implications he worked out on the level of essentia as St. Thomas was to do on the level of the act-of-being. The serious difficulties ahead of him lay somewhere else, namely, at the point where, in seeking to define the relation between beings and Being, he was to come to grips with the problem of creation. (p. 132)
[Augustine's view of understanding God: essentia; Aquinas' view of understanding God: act-of-being]
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St. Augustine knows very well that God exists and that the creative act has made the world exist. But just as he can only understand the existence of God conceived as the divine being [essence], so also does he confuse the existence of things [Aq.] with their being [Aug.]. Creation, then, becomes the act in virtue of which “He who is [existence] what He is” makes things be what they are [essence]. (p. 133)
One can speak only about one thing at a time. To be perfectly fair here one would have to say both that St. Augustine knows very well the meaning of creation, that is, of the production of being; and that his Platonism of being leaves him helpless to affirm clearly the act-of-being. So it is, as one of his best interpreters has observed, that all his explanations of creation tend naturally toward the level of participation....In a[n Augustinian] doctrine in which being and immutable being are one and the same thing, creation consists in producing essences, which can only be called beings because their relative stability imitates the perfect immobility of Him Who is. (p. 133)
Thus, however envisaged, the natural theology of St. Augustine seems to be dominated by the Platonic ontology of essence. Puzzled by the mystery of the divine name, he found himself similarly embarrassed when it came to explaining the being of things.... (p. 134)
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Whenever St. Augustine finds himself face to face with being, he speaks like one haunted by the restlessness that springs from believing more about it. He is ever turning toward the divine native impulse: “The angel—and in the angel the Lord—said to Moses who was asking his name: 'I am who am. Thou shalt say to the children of Israel: He Who Is hath sent me to you.' The word 'being' means 'to be immutable'....All changing things cease being what they were and begin being save what does not change. He has being, to Whom it has been said: Thou wilt change things and they will be changed, but Thou, thou remainest the same (Psalm CI, 27-28). What is meant by 'I am who am,' if not 'I am eternal'? What is meant by 'I am who am' unless 'I cannot change'?”
By strange paradox, the philosopher who most completely identified God with the transcendent immutability of Essence was the Christian most aware of the immanence of divine efficacy in nature, in the universal history of humanity, in the personal history of the individual conscience. When he speaks of these things as a theologian, St. Augustine seems infallible. Here he is without rival in the history of Christian thought. He has only disciples. His greatness is not the philosopher's but the theologian's whose philosophy lags behind his theology without retarding its progress. (p. 134) [Augustine: philosophy-transcendence; theology-immanence]
But it is better to insist upon the Augustinian immanence of God in the history of the world and of souls because nowhere is the philosophical inadequacy of Christian Platonism more evident. Augustine's entire religion, as it appears in The City of God, is based on a history dominated by the memory of two major events, Creation and Redemption, and upon the expectation of a third, the Last Judgment. In order to make a philosophy of history out of this theology of history Augustine drew but lightly upon his ontology of the Immutable. Instead of having to explain the detail of existences by a supreme Existing Being, he had to explain what is always other through what remains immutably the same. In brief, he could not explain philosophically the relation between history and God save in terms of the opposition between time and Eternity. It is conceivable that time is in eternity, but how is it conceivable, inversely, that Eternity may be in time? Yet it must be, at least if God's presence in history is to be assured. We willingly accord St. Augustine the full measure of success possible here, but we have also to recognize that to justify Christianity as history by means of an ontology in which becoming hardly deserves to be called being was a very difficult undertaking. (p. 135)
Augustine was far better equipped to establish God's transcendence than to justify His immanence in the soul...So it is that all his proofs for the existence of God, which are but so many impassioned searches for the divine presence, always bring Augustine to place God less within the soul than beyond it. Each proof tends to terminate in mystical experience, where the soul finds God only by escaping from its own becoming and rooting itself for the moment in the stability of the Immutable. These short experiences only serve to anticipate in time, by suspending its limitations, the final vicissitude of universal history in which the entire order of becoming will be transformed into the stable peace of eternity. (p. 135)
Augustine knows better than anyone that everything, even becoming, is the work of the Immutable. But it is precisely tat this point that he finds the mystery most obscure. No doubt no one could have cleared it up. But, at least, it was possible to show what latent intelligibility lay locked in the mystery. This was only possible by reducing the antimony of time and Eternity to the analogy of being to Being, that is, by moving from God as Eternity to God as Act-of-Being. “Eternity, it is the very substance of God”: these words of Augustine clearly mark the ultimate limits of his ontology. They explain who his thought had conceived as an antinomy of Eternity and Mutability the relation of man to God which, his experience assured him, resembled the intimacy of a mutual presence. “God is his own act-of-being”: these words of St. Thomas mark clearly the decisive progress attained by his ontology; they explain also the ease with which his thought could bind time to eternity, creature to Creator. For “He Who Is” signifies God's eternal present, and the cause of their being and of their duration: Being is innermost in each thing, and most fundamentally present within all things....Hence it must be that God is in all things, and innermostly.” (ST.I, 8, I) (pp. 135-136).
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....As we have said, Augustine's philosophy lagged behind his theology, but his theology itself was perfectly sound. Hence St. Thomas could take it as it stood, find therein exactly the same truth, but penetrate it more deeply than Augustine had done.... (p. 136)
[In reference to Dionysius or Denis:] To speak a propos of God, is not to speak of Him but of His effect. Being, of course, always bears the mark of the One, which is its cause. It is even because it is the effect of the One that being only is insofar as it is one. The imperfect, unstable and always divisible unity of beings is nevertheless in them like the causal energy by which they are. Let the transcendent One cease to penetrate a being with its light and it ceases at once to exist. It is in this profound sense that God can be called the being of everything that is: own totius esse. Yet God only appears under the aspect of being as the cause which makes things to be. To be exact, being is but the revealing or manifestation of the One; in a word, its "theophany." As to the One, it remains ante own: it is not entangled in the order of its participations. (p. 138)
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For Denis, God was a superesse, because He was 'not yet' the esse which He only becomes in His highest processions. For St. Thomas, God is the superesse because He is superlatively being; the Esse pure and simple, taken in its infinity and perfection. Touched by a magic wand, the doctrine of Denis issues forth transformed. St. Thomas has preserved it in its entirety, but nothing retains its former meaning. God's esse, it is true, still remains unknowable, so far as concerns us. But what no longer is the case is that our knowledge of things is a knowledge of something which God is not. We can now say of everything that is that God is it too. Indeed, we can say that He is it pre-eminently; that its being belongs to Him before it belongs to His creature. It is God's manner of being which completely escapes us. When all the necessary eliminations have been made, this at least remains, that each human concept of each being and of each mode of being authorizes us to conclude: Since that of which I have a concept, is, God is it. In such a doctrine, the invisibilia Dei continue to transcend our knowledge; but they transcend it in being's own line, since all God's attributes, known from created being, only become invisible to us when identified with the perfect simplicity of Esse.
In achieving this decisive progress, St. Thomas finally resolved the fundamental problem of the origin of finite being. From the very beginning, Greek thought had found itself at grips with this difficulty: how to place in the same explanation of the real the gods of religion and the principles of philosophy. In order to understand what things are, there must be principles, but to understand that things are, there must be cause. The Greek gods precisely were such causes....All Plato's myths are existential as all his dialectic is essential....
It is quite different in a natural theology like that of St. Thomas. His God is Esse. Now the act of being is like ther very stuff from which things are made. The real, therefore, is only intelligible by the light of the supreme Act-of-Being, which is God....
Such, indeed, is St. Thomas's God--not only the principle but the creator, not only the Good, but the Father. His providence extends to the least detail of being because His providence is only His causality. To cause an effect is but to propose to Himself its achievement. Moreover, it must be said of everything that is and acts that it depends immediately upon God in both its being and operations.
What God is in His eternal self, He remains as cause of events....But in Him creation and redemption are but His action which, like His power, is one with His act-of-being....I Am is the only God of whom it can be said that He is God of philosophers and scholars, and God, too, of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob. (pp. 141-143)
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