Author: Stephen Theron
ESSENCE, ESSE,
SIMPLICITY
In the following we wish
to highlight the openness of the positions defended by Thomas Aquinas in
metaphysics and to claim that it is this openness, or
"open-endedness", which is his work's most enduring or classical quality.
The focus is upon his fundamental considerations about God. Here, at the
beginning, he is explicit that he is discussing what he and his contemporaries call God, i.e. the discussion is
specified as theological. Thus the Five Ways all conclude to something of which
he says "and this we call God" (Ways Four and Five) or which
"all call, name or understand to be God" (Ways Three, Two and One
respectively).[1] Already here the method
entails a certain taking of distance from any specific religion, even from religious
praxis as such, as is proper to the
free play of theoria. Aquinas, after
all, derives religio, the term, from ligare, to bind. We can add that
religion (the "we", the medieval community beyond the walls of
universities or studia)
"calls" a certain philosophical ultimate God, Deus.
On just this point
"Thomism" is in our times often called in question as bona fide philosophy, viz. on the point
of the working principle that reason will never go against faith, that any such
contradiction indicates rational error. The openness needed for the discovery
of truth is here lacking, comments the theologian John Macquarrie.[2] It is
therefore important not to overlook such distinctions as the above, between God
and what we might call God, for example, which are genuinely present in the
text and mind of the author. Moreover, one is not obliged to take Thomas as one
with the Thomists in maintaining that philosophy cannot contradict faith. He
might just as well be taken as saying that we will never be asked to believe
something unreasonable. This cuts the other way, rather, pointing to the need
for development in the interpretation of doctrine, exemplified indeed in his
own scholarly praxis, which is thus
shown to be as dialectical as Hegel later claimed all philosophy had to be. In
theology the theme was later thematized in Newman's great work and was in fact
the very point upon which Newman espoused the Roman position in religion.[3]
**********************
The cardinal thesis of Thomism is often taken to be the necessary identity
of essence and esse in the First
Principle. This thesis, in Aquinas's presentation, is one with that of the
divine simplicity, which it explicates. For Aquinas[4] esse and simplicity are both primarily negative conceptions. Non possumus scire esse Dei.[5] They are also
stated to be the first and second divine attribute respectively.[6] Esse, as a verb or action-word, has the
force of act. So it is not well translated by "existence", which
connotes veritas propositionis more
than it does actus essendi, while
"being" is a yet more unfocussed term for the uninitiated.
So we should recall firstly that according to Thomas we know neither the
divine essence nor this actus essendi
with which it is identified.[7] We
know only the fact, the veritas
propositionis or truth of the proposition, if we have come so far, that Deus est. Both subject and predicate are
unknown to us, but if we understood them both perfectly, "knew" them,
we would see, as we now infer, that they are identical,[8] i.e.
that "Deus est" is equivalent to a hypothetical proposition
"Deus est esse" in which the S and P term would have the same supposition (suppositio), albeit according to the different formal and material
manner of predicate and subject terms respectively. To illustrate this difference
(between knowing God and knowing what God can be said to be), I can infer that
the owner of a particular car is the killer of a given victim without knowing
either this owner (who he is) or how he or she killed the victim. There is a
difference, that is, between inferring and directly understanding, apprehensio,
which is the first of the three acts or instruments (organa) of knowing in terms of the Aristotelian logical theory
taken over by St. Thomas.
Applying this to the idea that God is concluded to by Aquinas as being that
which is "self-explanatory" (see below) although, essentially, we are
unable to understand the explanation, we find that no character whatever has been given thus far to this object
to which our thought concludes. We have only established that the ultimate
principle explains itself ( in some unanalysed sense of this notion), i.e. we
have not ourselves explained it; the notion rather signals our abandonment of
any attempt to do so. It explains itself as to its nature and its being
indifferently, since both of these, it has been argued, must be one.
To illustrate further the generality or open-endedness of this claim one
may affirm that exactly the same claim can be made for the professed atheist
J.M.E. McTaggart´s infinite "Absolute", which is an impersonal unity
(not merely a community) of personal spirits, each finite in a defined sense
which is compatible with the identity of each, nonetheless, with the infinite,
Hegel´s all-pervasive concept of "identity in difference".[9] There
too, in McTaggart, we do not know or understand how this, to which it is
concluded, can be so.
Secondly, in illustration, for the attribute of absolute simplicity, in
Aquinas, no more is claimed than this identity of essence and esse. So it too can apply equally to any
candidate for the position of being ultimate and "absolute". The
paradoxes are no more glaring in the one case than in the other, or maybe in
any other (One might want to say that the Chestertonian defence of paradox rests willy-nilly upon a previous Hegelian
moment in intellectual history just as Hegelianism rests willy-nilly upon the
Christian experience, as Hegel acknowledged. Indeed he claimed, thus far, like
any theologian or Fleet Street journalist, to interpret it). Thus simplicity in
God, for Aquinas, co-exists with a plurality of attributes, imposed indeed
according to our manner of abstractive thinking more than in themselves, but
above all it co-exists with a Trinity of persons constituting real relations.
For Aquinas God must be simple with the same necessity as God is necessarily
this Trinity, not more, not less. Indeed it has to be the same necessity, viz. God himself and not some "law"
outside of him, not even of his "nature" except by a very distant
analogy indeed. Aquinas offers the beginning merely of an understanding in
terms of a more perfect identity between the terms of a more perfect processio. "By how much more
perfectly something proceeds (ad intra),
by that much is it one with that from which it comes."[10]
Aquinas´s method, keeping the "revealed" apart from the
"philosophical", obscures this all-purpose compatibility of divine
simplicity somewhat. Hegel, by contrast, felt bound to attempt integration,
this being, in his eyes, the project of philosophy itself.[11] We
may recall G. Grisez´s criticism that Aquinas´s treatise on the finis ultimus is "not well
integrated" with his moral theology.
Aquinas´s difficulties are not less, though, than those encountered by
McTaggart in wanting to show that his Absolute is a perfect unity (effectively
the import of simplicitas, not
otherwise good for much in terms of value), that is, a whole without
composition or parts distinct from it. Thus McTaggart claims that each person,
as cognitive or conscious, possesses the unity of the whole within him- or
herself.[12]
So a simplicity concerning which we can judge but which we cannot apprehend
cannot thus far be claimed to be more truly exemplified in the one system or
hypothesis than in the other. The Allah of Islam, rather, would seem to have
the edge here. As a corollary, too, one would be justified in claiming that any
valid version of Anselm´s Ontological Argument, should there be one, would
similarly establish the existence of the most perfect entity conceivable
without being able to say anything about the character of this
"absolute", i.e. not anything more.
The McTaggartian pluri-unity might embody perfection more perfectly than a
Trinitarian conception. Of course we might still go along with Thomas´s
deductions of at least some or one of the attributes, such as love, rather than
attribute perversities to this unknown Absolute, but that is another matter
since we would be guided here by our ethical preferences merely.[13] In
general, the identity of essence and esse
in God does not mean that God is a pure contentless act of esse ("existential" Thomism), since we know nothing as to
what this divine esse might be and
even the Catholic doctrine of analogy teaches that unlikeness of divine to
created esse (Fourth Lateran Council) will or must be greater than likeness,
so that anything is possibly thinkable. The divine esse might have not much to do with existence as we know it at all.
The still, small voice heard by Elijah, after all, might have been really small
and not just small because coming from far away.
So the identity of essence and existence in the necessary simplicity of the
first principle means no more than that here there is a limit to explanation,
to the appropriateness of giving a "reason of being". There are no further reasons. The identity does not
of itself mean, therefore, that the principle "explains itself" or
need do so, is "self-explanatory". Such a reduction suggests a
gratuitous rationalism. No concept of explanation need be thought to apply here
at all, or what else does the primacy of being over essence mean? We might say,
with McTaggart (and Wittgenstein), that explanations apply within the universe,
not to the universe as a whole, not to God. God has no need to explain himself.
We would anyhow need, in addition, in view of the Kantian criticism,
confirmation of the Anselmian Cartesian view of existence as an indispensable
perfection. This after all is not self-evident, witness also neoplatonism,
Nicholas of Cusa or many statements of Hegel:
The same stricture is applicable to those who
define God to be mere Being; a definition not a whit better than that of the
Buddhists, who make God to be Nought[14]
The question here would be whether Hegel simply fails to achieve the
intuition which Thomas expresses thus:
aliquid
cui non fit additio, potest intelligi dupliciter. - Uno modo, ut de ratione
eius sit quod non fiat ei additio; sicut de ratione animalis irrationalis est
ut sit sine ratione. - Alio modo intelligitur aliquid cui non fit additio, quia
non est de ratione eius quod sibi fit additio, sicut animal commune est sine
ratione, quia non est de ratione animalis communis ut habeat rationem, sed nec
de ratione eius est ut careat ratione. Primo igitur modo, esse sine additione
est esse divinum; secundo modo esse sine additione est esse commune.[15]
Here Aquinas is defining terms before making the substantive claim that
ipsum
esse est perfectissimum omnium; comparatur enim ad omnia ut actus... actualis
omnium rerum et etiam ipsarum formarum.[16]
This though involves him, in his next sentence, in the doubtful idea that
"things acquire existence"[17],
which might suggest that his main claim, of esse
as perfectissimum, the basic
Anselmian posture, should be differently supported rather. If, with Hegel, we
think first of actuality (Wirklichkeit,
as in Frege too) rather than of esse
(these two notions however, actualitas
and esse, are identified by Aquinas),
then
Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of
essence with existence,[18]
something which is easier to see. For things do not "acquire" actuality
(as Thomas says in effect of esse)
since it is only as actuality that they are and are, as we say, actually
things. Esse cannot be receptum since there is nothing to
receive it. One has absolutized a metaphor here. But nor is the other
Scholastic option, also though allowed by Aquinas at its proper place, viz.
that forma dat esse, any less
inappropriate. Actuality, again, is the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence. If just this is what it
immediately is then there is no actualitas
omnium formarum, no actuality of essence itself. Contrariwise, existence by
itself, not united thus immediately with an essence, is no more than an
abstraction. Nonetheless, for Hegel too, utter actuality lies in their
identification in the Absolute.
But it does not follow from this identification in the Absolute, and the
Absolute´s consequent necessity, logically speaking, that we should see just esse as "most perfect of all
(perfections)". Aquinas himself, we have just seen, argues for this
position independently of the original identification, on the other ground of simplicity,
non-derivability being a species of non-compositeness. Thus Hegel, for example,
sees the divine perfection rather in an "absolute subjectivity", and
it is as "self-knowing" or "thinking itself" (Aristotle's
conception) that an Absolute is deduced as "absolutely actual."[19]This
perfection of the divinity though, he thinks, has only come to light under
Christianity, "the absolute religion".
It belongs of course to Aquinas's method
to establish divine perfection independently of Christianity, not only as a
procedure of apologetics (as in the Summa
contra Gentes) but also, by way of distinction, within sacred theology
itself. The question here though is whether that perfection can be identified
in advance as esse or as anything
else, so that the posterior revelation will then be simply filling out the
content of what is already understood generically. Love, as in "God is
love", will then be as if a species merely of an esse ("God is esse") viewed logically as more fundamental
(than love) whereas metaphysically or in reality love will be the true face of
this esse, as it were its
"essence". This could not, incidentally, be the case with
goodness since the divine goodness is for Thomas a mere ens rationis, being the same real esse as presented to will.[20]
There is a definite possibility therefore of thinking of love as more
fundamental as a "category" than being, as we in fact find in
McTaggart's philosophy or, maybe, that of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. There can
arise a suspicion that the ultimate mysteries have been held without warrant to
(and thus distorted by) the specifics of our predication system. Hegel's
dialectic, by contrast, begins with being as the simplest starting-point and
passes well beyond it, through essence to the notion and within the latter to
knowledge and finally, in McTaggart's hands, to love. That for McTaggart it is
a matter of indifference whether we name the Absolute as God, a putative being,
might reinforce the point here. Is he, again, more or less of an atheist than
one who shall have said of himself that who sees him sees the Father or that
who does a thing to the least of men does it to him, reckoned as God-man? Put
differently, we see that this dilemma of theism or atheism depends upon a
universe of existents, of substances, where "each thing is itself and not
another thing".
So here again we feel the pressure to evaluate these old systems ethically,
which is in fact what Hegel understands as an effect of revelation. The latter,
he thinks, must be brought into philosophy, all the formal and procedural
distinctions notwithstanding, as we see from his frequent allusions to
Christianity in the Logic. E. Gilson
in effect makes the same point, of continuity, but as a historian. For Hegel
though history itself, seen from the absolute viewpoint, is, while so
contingent in appearance, really a symbolic manifestation of a dialectical
series misapprehended as temporal, the details of which we grope after. This
discovery of the dialectic is itself a fruit of humanity's confrontation with a
sacred history, he finds reason to
think, however "immanent" his final analysis of the sacred.
Despite these more mystical perspectives, however, Hegel cautions us that
It does no good to put on airs against the
Ontological proof, as it is called, and against Anselm thus defining the
Perfect. the argument is one latent in every unsophisticated mind, and recurs
in every philosophy, even against its wish.[21]
This is Hegel's response, mild enough, to the Kantian criticisms, though
such a handsome admission might have been made by Aquinas himself while also,
mildly, rejecting Anselm. When Hegel adds though that the argument recurs in
every philosophy "even... without its knowledge" he concurs in what
we are urging here with respect to Aquinas.
It has been well shown, anyway, that Hegel's own dialectic does not begin
with what we stigamtized above as a merely abstract being or with its
correlate, nothing, two notions he identifies. It begins with becoming, and only thus does it have the
movement within itself to be (become) a dialectic, i.e. a ceaseless refusal of
conceptual absolutization. Becoming too, all the same,
taken at its best on its own ground is an
extremely poor term: it needs to grow in depth and weight of meaning.[22]
So Hegel writes elsewhere that
One has acquired great insight when one realises
that being and not-being are abstractions without truth and that the first
truth is Becoming alone.[23]
In the Encyclopaedia, at Section
88, accordingly, he praises Heraclitus's dictum that "Being no more is
than not-Being" as an instance of "the real refutation of one system
(sc. the Eleatic) by another", as if seeming to reject his otherwise
omni-operative notion of synthesis here, though we might in general stand by a
claim that "real refutation" as notion tends to be assimilated (aufgehoben indeed) to that of synthesis.
The dictum refutes as showing that "both abstractions are alike
untenable". What Heraclitus does is to "exhibit the dialectical
movement in its principle." As Gadamer explains it:
Whoever asks how movement starts in Being (sc. if
the dialectic is wrongly assumed to begin there) should admit that in raising
this question he has abstracted from the movement of thought within which he finds himself raising it.
Pure being or pure nothing are abstractions made prior to the discovery of
the first truth. It would though be a crass error to identify such Becoming in
Hegel with real time and change. The movement of the dialectic is not temporal
(history symbolizes or depicts, narrates it merely), since its whole purpose is
to transcend and thus negate the temporal in favour of the Absolute and
infinite. Time, indeed, is one of the "moments" or categories to be
overcome, like causality, finite categories serving at the surface of everyday
essentialist common-sense merely, not giving insight into reality in itself.[24]
The true and supra-temporal interpretation of dialectical becoming is
clearly set forth by McTaggart in the penultimate chapter, on the dialectic and
time, of his Studies in the Hegelian
Dialectic of 1896. One might add, though this is soft-pedalled by
McTaggart, that Hegel's ideal is to be found in his conception of the consuming
life or fire of the Trinity, as well say in the essential restlessness of
Thought (thinking itself, says Aristotle) as such. In his Commentary on Hegel's Science
of Logic of 1910 McTaggart criticized Hegel's adoption of the term Becoming
here, as due to his wishing to claim Heraclitus as fore-runner, precisely because
it might suggest an endorsement of temporality at odds with the whole system of
absolute idealism as conceived by Hegel. Regarding the Trinity we have to add
that Hegel as idealist is comparatively indifferent to the usual worries as to
whether the Christian conceptions so central to his philosophy
"correspond" to an empirical reality or not. This is to seek Christ,
with the Crusaders, at the empty sepulchre in the earthly Jerusalem.
************************
We return though to the self-explanatory. This term was used by Abbot
Christopher Butler when defending a version of Aquinas's Third Way for knowing
that God exists.[25] Butler refers here to
"the atheist's miracle", whereby he means that on any atheist view
experience and reality "miraculously" have no explanation, such as
only a recognizably theistic view can offer. The case of Spinoza might have
given him pause here, since people cannot agree whether Spinoza's system, which
offers a final explanation in Butler's sense, is atheistic or theistic. Against
the facile charge of pantheism Hegel suggested that Spinoza's system should
rather be called "acosmism", since he explains (away) the world by
saying that only God exists and
A philosophy which affirms that God and God alone
is, should not be stigmatized as atheistic.[26]
Perhaps Dom Butler would have agreed. John Finnis, anyhow, takes up the
argument for the self-explanatory in section X.2 of his book on Aquinas, Aquinas, entitled "Towards
Explanation".[27]
After repeating here the thesis that esse
is the act of all acts he asserts that in our experience "there is nothing
that exists simply in virtue of being the sort of thing it is." Any object
of investigation can therefore be postulated, "spoken of", as not
existing, now or at some other time. This means that however long the
explanatory (causal, "whether taken diachronically or
synchronically") chain is made to be the universe of our experience is
"radically under-explained".
Finnis finds "the one reasonable inference" here to be that
since there are these realities whose existing
needs explanation, there must be a reality whose existing does not need
explanation... such that what it is
includes that it is.
He has introduced here the idea of "needs" as a more than
rational postulate, one that is rationalist
rather, though the position is common to Aquinas and McTaggart (omne ens est verum is the relevant tag),
even, in fact, to Nietzsche in so far as he claims (in The Gay Science) to justify his version of "the eternal
return" as the rational explanation of everything. Finnis's claim,
however, is based upon the apparent self-evidence (to him) of the universe's
not being everything.
Once again, however, awareness that there must be an explanation and that
we have not got it does not itself, could not itself give the explanation,
quite apart from the fact that one can question the awareness. Thus how does
even God "explain" the smell of snow as enjoyed by young children? No
explanation could, in fact, measure up to the experience. So why should just
God be so "self-explanatory"? For that ultimate, self-explanatory
reality here postulated there is no presumption that it will be the personal
God of theism. Even Aristotle's characterization of it as "thought
thinking itself" leaves open the question whether our own intellects are
separable from that.
Aquinas's formula, we are claiming, is even more agnostic. To say that the
ultimate principle exists necessarily is simply to say over again that reality
is totally explicable. Metaphysical and logical necessity, that is, are found
to merge after all. On such a ground, for example, one might reject a
"naturalist" account of the genesis of explanatory reasoning in terms
of evolution merely as circular, a "contradiction in performance."[28]
That something is necessary one may well claim. But if one is prepared to
specify this necessity, as being, for example, a personal Trinity, without
being able to show the necessity of this specification then, in the area of
debate, one has cut the ground from under one's own feet, philosophically
speaking at least. For people may then come with other candidates for the
position and on other rational grounds rather than simply
"revelation". Admission of revelation, its possibility, that is,
alters the picture. For what would need to be revealed would be ipso facto not self-explanatory or,
rather, anything whatever could fill in the blank space and just therefore be
dubbed self-explanatory, simply as first or ultimate, thus depriving the
epithet of the required "clout", differentiating the position from
atheism, say. The claim only functions, that is to say, where one believes one
can supply a principle of self-explanation as such, i.e. one which is not
simultaneously something else (aliquid
cui non fit additio). But this is no more than an impossibly reified
abstraction.
So one's original conclusion, in so far as pretending to be to the
existence of something specific, such as the all-perfect one and simple being,
is exposed as non-coercive, having only a show of rationalist rigour. The principle
argued for is at best an open structure, not specific enough to be called God.
In a word, if the Absolute is held to be a Trinity then it must be granted that
it could without contradiction be some other thing at least prima facie equally at variance with
simplicity, such as McTaggart's plurality of spirits in supra-communal unity
(like to the Trinity in that). The only way to avoid this would be to say that
the necessity of God as Trinity could not be denied without contradiction, but
this is not only less orthodox than our exegesis of Thomism but also most
likely false.
Does it anyhow follow that a thing "might not have existed" if
its existence is not included explicitly in or identified with its essence as
we know it? Here again, for Aquinas, we do not know the essence of the humblest
insect secundum se, but only through
the accidents. So there might be an unsuspected necessity there! Further, he
attributes necessity not only to the First Principle, but to angels, the human
soul and prime matter.[29]
Intuitions can be flexible here. We might in fact as well argue in reverse from
a thing's necessity or eternity that its existence, that of the archangel
Gabriel say, is therefore "essential" to it, necessary, even when we
do not otherwise know this, e.g. if
we believed the world to be eternal.
That Aquinas does not himself take this road depends entirely upon his
believing that he has established the reality of a principle transcending the
world.
The world, of course, stands outside any causal chain within the world. Nor do we see the world's necessary existence,
but then neither do we see God's, we have been urging here. We merely postulate
and indeed absolutize and personalize it, saying that there must (necessarily)
be a necessary existence such that it is, moreover, simply that. Non aliquo modo est, but est, est
(Augustine). This much Aquinas plainly concedes:
esse
dupliciter dicitur. - Uno modo significat actum essendi;... Primo igitur modo,
accipiendo esse, non possumus scire esse Dei, sicut nec eius essentiam,...[30]
We do not even know if it is possible,
logically or conceptually, that a thing's essence can be its existence, however
much our demand for explanation might seem to include this. There may be other
possibilities, not as yet conceived, just as this identification which we are
discussing was not made from the beginning and might eventually have to give
way or undergo some total shift in significance.
Actuality, again, is a broader and less dogmatic term than existence. Thus
Aquinas himself says at times, suggestively, that God is pure form while
thought (nous) is often, like the
Plotinian "One", contradistinguished against existence (me on, not ouk on).
Finnis's "reasonable inference", therefore, is merely posited,
not inferred. For one would always have to explain
the self-explanatoriness, just as much as one has to explain anything else, and
it might turn out to be impossible. Normal self-explanatoriness, after all,
means that a person gives a (propositional) explanation of himself, the reasons
and causes of his actions and sufferings, but here what is meant is that the
person or supra-person is himself or herself the explanation in his or her own
right. There is, incidentally, a similar difficulty about Kant's description of
people as themselves ends. An end is either propositional/intentional or an
entity one wants to get, not a person. The mere consideration that a person
should not be made a means to some ulterior end does not give ground for
declaring him actually to be an end himself. In fact he is not made to be even a means; rather, some act of manipulation
of him is the means. Kant means that we should not perform acts of
manipulation, as they then come to be called, as means to ends not consented to
or known of by the person thus manipulated.
In fact God could not be self-explanatory. He could only, like the smell of
snow we mentioned, set a terminus to explanation.
So in fact this self-explanatoriness is not itself explained to us. Again,
we know neither the esse nor the
essence (claimed to be one and the same) of God. This explanation in terms of
self-explanatoriness only exceeds other explanations in its abstractness or
lack of concrete reality. But that an unknown thing's necessary being is more
plausible than the (to begin with) unknown necessity of some being otherwise
known to us is by no means self-evident, nor even itself plausible. We might
ourselves, as in McTaggart's system, be necessary beings. Here we touch on the
ambiguity of "closer to" (intimior)
in Augustine's "There is one closer to me than I am to myself". Much
hinges here on the notion of infinity, discussed by Hegel mainly in response to
Spinoza's usage of the term:
The True or Affirmative infinite, according to
Hegel, cannot represent the mere negation of the Finite, since this would
involve a simple contradiction. Being exclusive of, and beyond the Finite, it
would itself be finite.[31]
For Aquinas this is why all created being is analogous, adding nothing to
God's unique actus essendi (of which we, therefore, can only speak
analogously as speaking in terms taken from the finite). Hegel though, here,
rather recalls Parmenides. The infinite "must represent a kind of
union", superseding the usual "uneasy see-saw or self-cancelling
union between finite and infinite",
which is not an external bringing together of
these aspects, nor an improper connection contrary to their nature, in which
opposed, separated, mutually independent entities are incompatibly combined.
Rather must each element be in itself the unity, and this only as an overcoming
of self, in which neither element has the prerogative, either as regards
being-in-itself or determinate positive being. As shown previously, finitude
exists only as a passing beyond itself: the infinite, its own other, is
therefore contained in itself. And similarly infinity only exists as the going
beyond the finite: it therefore contains its other, and so is in itself its own
other. The finite is not overcome by the infinite as by an externally existent
might, but it is its own infinity whereby it transcends itself.[32]
This, pace Findlay
("confusing and repetitive talk"), is precisely the account of the
Absolute, which is thus not exclusively what is infinite, given by McTaggart.
Being, for Parmenides too, was infinite and had no parts. This is the prelude
to the study of consciousness and/or cognition found in both Hegel and
Aristotle. It is in fact esse which
is cognitive and, thus, thought or thinking (when Gilson says "Man is not
a thinker; man is a knower" he wishes merely to safeguard thought's
identity with the real, less ambiguously asserted in Hegel).
Spinoza argued for his God from what might be seen as an extensionalist
conception of infinity undeniable without self-contradiction, while for Aquinas
infinity is seen in terms of attributes or perfections not inherently subject
to limit, such as being, goodness, beauty, power, mercy, but unlike squareness,
healthiness or, maybe, justice.[33] A
thing may be absolutely but not infinitely square. Hegel took the superficially
revolutionary step, latent in the older texts, of relating infinity to
cognitive consciousness, to thinking. He could quote in support of his view the
Aristotelian anima est (quodammodo) omnia.
The whole tradition is thus a reversal of the eighteenth century adage, proudly
placed by G.E. Moore at the head of his Principia
Ethica (1903), viz. "Each thing is itself and not another thing",
to which we might reply, in conciliatory vein, "Yes, it is; yet then again
it isn't." One recalls Bentham's "Each to count for one and none for
more than one", to which a Kantian or Christian, while not denying
fairness, might counter, "Each to
count for all and none for less than all," this deeper truth remaining
through and beyond all distribution. Similarly Augustine's saying, like St.
Paul's "In him we live and move and have our being" or sayings such
as "I in them and they in me" or "members one of another"
transcend Moore's tag. Treatment of sympathy and substitution, incidentally,
belongs in philosophy or it belongs nowhere.
The world as a whole does not explain itself. There must be an explanation.
From these premises one concludes to the self-explanatory, which, since not
seen (that, certainly, is clear), "dwells in light inaccessible",
transcends experience. Transcendence, as also transcendentally good, might
however take an initiative, so that a man might say "He that has seen me
has seen the Father", "I and the Father are one". Talk of an
intiative, however, is more systemically thought of as narrative representing
necessity.
Behind such traditions, that is to say, lies hidden infinity as
consciousness, as defined by Hegel, implicit in Aristotle, explicit in some
oriental thought. Man is God, God is man. Aquinas himself allows hypostatic
union with a plurality of human natures, so why not all?[34] Thus
from the premises mentioned one might conclude, not that there is a
self-explanatory personal being (which we have found totally mystifying) but
that the world is misperceived (which is merely surprising). The contradictions
inherent in notions of time and matter could then be conceded. They would then
be misperceptions or, less harshly, symbolic ways of apprehending reality (in
fact nothing else is consistent with a purely naturalistic evolutionary
paradigm, itself by the same reasoning symbolic, even though reason itself
necessarily transcends the picture as itself originating the symbolism, though
why it does so we are not obliged to know). In any case Hegel will radicalize
everything finite as ipso facto
"untrue", just as every predication is in a sense false as
identifying two disparate things. What occurs is a kind of voluntary
estrangement of the Absolute Idea occurring, as I interpret him, by analogy
(but only by analogy) with the Trinity, as processio
ad extra derivative upon the processio
ad intra, why, it is hard to say (on this point the Zen Buddhist D.T.
Suzuki said he could not become a Christian, not seeing why God needed to make
a world. Bonum est diffusivum sui is
not so easily seen to meet the case either). The error here is that nothing can
be extra to or "ontologically
discontinuous" with the actually infinite. The postulate of an analogy of
being concedes as much without saying so. For the same reason, i.e. it means
the same, omne ens est verum, i.e.
knowable to spirit. The world is not an alternative pole to God, to the
Absolute. Nor is self this, if we remember Augustine's saying cited above, the
meaning of which gives us the true self or atman.
Spinoza sees not merely all objects but especially conscious beings as modes of the infinite,
"contractions" in Nicholas of Cusa's parallel system. The thought is
echoed, mutatis mutandis, by the
Thomist L.-M. Régis:
Intentional being is not a sort of logical being
invented by human reason, a sort of hypothesis to account for facts. It is a
creature of God, intended to expand the limited being of some of His creatures
so that they might, without being God... become the whole universe or one or
other of its aspects (cf. Quodl. VIII
4c; ST Ia 56, 2 ad 3um; 80, 1c).[35]
Why not become rather God or one another then, it is logical to ask?
Aquinas, anyhow, had said as much as is said here in making each of his angels
created with the species of all
things within him, a priori
omniscient, a kind of cipher for a future Hegelianism not captured by the
Averroistic idea of a common intellect,
which he opposed. As McTaggart will say:
the unity... has no reality distinct from the
individuals (i.e. considered each by each)... somehow in them... whole meaning of the differentiation of the unity is its
being differentiated into that particular plurality, [36]
i.e. no one is contingent, and here Leslie Armour comments that McTaggart's
"community of timeless loving spirits appears to be an expansion of the
Trinity"[37], something the latter
would never have conceded, seeing such Trinitarian thought as at most
prefiguring his own view.
For Aquinas the angels are not strictly timeless, they do not have the
necessity of these spirits we ourselves would be according to McTaggart, since
they are created and subject to divine omnipotence.[38] By
the concept of the aevum Aquinas
would distinguish immutable spirits (according to their esse but not according to electio,
their own or God's, or even to affections or places[39])
from their eternal creator. He needs
the concept and one might enquire if it might be applied to McTaggart's system,
which would then reduce to that "angelism" which Maritain, in his
book Three Reformers identifies in
the theist Descartes. Aevum however
has many difficulties, which Aquinas by no means surmounts, saying that we
concede ad praesens (for the
present?) that there is only one aevum.[40] Be that as it
may, the detailed angelology of Aquinas corresponds at many points with
McTaggart's and Hegel's view of the true nature of personality, spirit, as
"infinite-in-finitude".[41]
For Régis, anyhow, the qualifier "without being God" is important
though in functional terms we might ask why this should be so. Karl Rahner
refers, in an early paper, to "the mad and secret Hegelian dream of
equality with God".[42] The
Indian notion of the atman or true
self, again, undercuts the dilemma. The Other closer to myself is indeed I and
I he. "The eye with which God sees me is the eye with which I see
him" (Eckhart). No doubt in temporal terms I have to rise to consciousness
of this, as in Paul's "I live, yet not I, but Christ lives in me".
This, reflection will show, can only be by an identification. The ontology,
needed as underpinning a yet more specific sacramental
ontology, is not less of an ontology because, say, it is reserved to a sacred
sphere of "grace" (theology). For whether or not special help is
needed for this consciousness, this reality rather, it falls as object under
the philosophical task of ascertaining how things are, one that can brook no
confinement to partiality without being corrupted in its inmost nature. Grace,
anyhow, would be self-effacing in making a person's acts all the more his or
her own or free. Intellect, as capax Dei
(itself "coming from outside" on the Aristotelian version of the later
natural-supernatural dualism), is receptive of the whole, having, as spirit,
this unity, the whole, really within itself. The body is at most a cipher for
this, not a competing alternative. Hence, as Aquinas saw, "body" is
only spoken of thus abstractly or cum
praecisione in a context of logic, or "in second intention". What
is real is the man, the human person, and here idealism begins, since man is a
conscious spirit, is subject. The religious doctrine of the infused, separately
created soul, antiquely colliding as a partly materialist realism with modern
science, means this simply and so gives way to it upon analysis. By contrast
there is no contradiction between natural science and an absolute idealist
analysis of observation and cognition, in physics or biology.[43]
So, again, the body is a cipher, not material, not divisible, not a
so-called incomplete substance. It belongs within the sphere of symbolic forms
and limited consciousness which McTaggart summarily characterizes as
misperception, along with time, change and, it becomes clear, the making of
judgments. These are actually, for McTaggart, misperceived perceptions, a kind
of inversion of Hume taking place here. But these startling theses McTaggart
finds coiled in Hegel and of course we may reserve judgment (or perception!).
Still, mind as about to "become the whole" and the empirically
observable body do not seem as two quasi-entities ever to be capable of good
alignment. The challenge here is to devise a philosophy of nature and of science
to correspond, in an integrated cognition theory.
"We do not know what we shall be" was a text admired by
McTaggart, who equated what we shall be with what we are. He believed, after
all, like so many, in forgotten incarnations, as ignorance for Plato was not
other than the profoundest forgetfulness. McTaggart insists though that the
unity he treats of is "for" the individuals, not the individuals for
the unity or whole which, he claims, cannot itself be personal. Persons as
spiritual are infinite-in-finitude, necessary
differentiations (i.e. just these actual persons are necessary) of "the
unity". This, in Hegelian terms, is the liberty and emergence from
religious slavery proper to just Christian man, where we are friends (making up
yet each possessing the unity), not servants (of the unity). A Catholic might
see this truth well imaged in the much decried custom of the private Mass,
provided that any Christian might thus celebrate it, as indeed some women
saints in childhood are said to have done, or might have done if they hadn't.
Here one thinks of Hegel's saying that the nobility of Christian doctrine
renders questions about its historical truth (realist attachment to the
Sepulchre in Jerusalem) peripheral. The old idea of spiritual exegesis, giving
life as against the killing letter, is not unconnected with this. Carried
through consistently this style of consciousness (and we were considering
developing consciousness) leads to the contemporary Beethovenian view that
"music is a greater revelation than the whole of religion and
philosophy". As we found ethics determining the metaphysical, so here we
find the aesthetical (inseparable from the idea of the noble) determining the
ethical and thus also the metaphysical. McTaggart offers us the "most
perfect" unity, not of course as sole guarantee of its truth but clearly
seen as the most persuasive. Thus has belief always been born and style is
indeed inseparable from content. To argue for this in detail calls for a
separate full-length treatment, however. If the claim appears subversive of
academic values yet academia needs to advert to it as embodying the immanentist
thesis urged here.
Where other and self are identified one can pray to the atman as to the other or to the other as
to the self indifferently. "I in them and they in me". We speak,
after all, of owing things to oneself, of forgiving (or not) oneself. Agnosce o christiane dignitatem tuam is
an Augustinian text that has gone into the liturgy. The thesis is plausible.
What then is it?
****************
This. Thomas Aquinas has demonstrated the reality of something beyond which
one cannot ask for further explanation. But he has not shown that this reality
is ipso facto
"self-explanatory", such that it would amount to a "category
mistake" even to speak of further explanation. One cannot even show from
Aquinas's texts that "self-explanatory" is a coherent or meaningful
expression when applied to anything besides statements or propositions
considered "analytic". "Can you explain this?" is always
shorthand for explaining why this is so, within
some universe, real, hypothetical or fictitious. Similarly
"self-smoking", although grammatical, is virtually nonsense. This is
not in itself especially damaging to Aquinas since he himself does not use the
expression "self-explanatory" or, we claim, anything equivalent to
it, such as the Spinozist causa sui might
be.
In saying "and this we call God" he does no more than make a
statement about himself and contemporaries (within a broad generational
perspective), reminiscent of his example of offering sacrifice (to higher
powers) as an acknowledged duty apud
omnes, not of any strict philosophical relevance and even become today
counter-intuitive. To see this helps clarify the perennial relevance of his
thought.
The next part of the thesis is that the necessary identity Aquinas claims
of the categories of essence and existence in ultimate reality is just that and
nothing more. Therefore, nothing forbids interpreting this result as
demonstrating the irrelevance or at least limited application of these very
categories to that for which further explanation cannot be asked, as in
Nicholas of Cusa, but also in a sense in the whole Hegelian dialectic, where we
leave the finite category of essence behind in favour of the notion as giving final truth. They are
useful analogies merely and, as such, characteristic of Aquinas's general
loosely questing method. If we take them univocally we make the same kind of
mistake as do those who take each element and argument that Hegel uses in
illustrative development of the principle of dialectic as non-negotiable, as
McTaggart shows particularly well in his early Hegelian studies and
commentaries. All that is needed, within a certain margin of possible error
(whatever Hegel himself thought regarding his choice of categories), is the
confrontation (antinomy) of finite categories leading up to the Absolute Idea.
The consequent attribute of simplicity in Aquinas, therefore, is a totally
open concept, allowing not only relations of reason, plus other attributes, but
also real relations within the final Absolute, absolved or loosed from all that
is subject to explanation, since itself the "ground" of explanation.
The ground can only ground itself by retreating begore a further ground,
whether we speak of causa sui or ens a se. A thing can only cause itself
as two things, like two boards leaning together, might eternally cause each
other. What indeed is the Father without the Son? Particularly in eternity, and
not merely in logic, if we persist in speaking in this way, the originated
originates the originator. We have a circle which is, of course, simultaneously
linear (priority of the Father).
Ens a se, however, simply states negatively that the
Absolute does not depend on anything, is absolute. Put differently, the
"self-explanatory" notion as advanced by Butler and Finnis is
Spinozistic (causa sui) rather than
Thomistic (or Hegelian).
With this open metaphysical frame of an Absolute both Aquinas and
McTaggart, say, go on to offer anthropologies including accounts of immortality
or eternal life for human beings. Hegel shows little direct interest in this in
his writings (he perhaps felt that in a sense he enjoyed it already or
"timelessly"!) though there is more than mere abstention from its
denial, as in the passage speaking of "articulated groups... unsundered
spirits transcendent to themselves.... shapes of heaven".[44]
When the Christians canonized the principle of spiritual or mystical
interpretation (which orthodoxy depends upon according to J.H. Newman but which
occurs as prophecy in Judaism generally) of the Old Testament they could not
refuse its application to the later or "New" texts, though they have
often wished to (as if "seventy times seven", for example, did not
allow one to forgive for a four hundred and ninety first time!). It is at work
within the texts themselves, e.g. the parables. So nothing in the texts
prohibits eventual replacement through enrichment of the notion of God, some
"new approach" dictating this. This too might be in the spirit of the
greatest of revolutionaries, who urged us to greater things than he, if
possible, and not bury the talent. This, in their day, was done by Paul,
Augustine, Aquinas, Hegel, in the spirit of their prototype, and even, they
claim, indwelling principle, in relation to the contemporary Judaism. As part
of this creativeness of approach the dependence upon a factual prototype (the
empty sepulchre at Jerusalem) appears to become, by the time(!) of Hegel, in
some measure sublated, the messenger becoming one with the message. This is the
positive sense, often missed, of the Voltairian paradox, "If God did not
exist it would be necessary to invent him".
[1] Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologica Ia, 2, 3.
[2] John Macquarrie,
Twentieth Century Religious Thought, SCM, London 1971. Cf. Stephen Theron, “Faith as Thinking with Assent”, New Blackfriars, January 2005.
[3] John Henry Newman, Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, 1845.
[4] Ia 3. All references to Aquinas are to the Summa theologica where not otherwise specified.
[5] Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
[6] Cf. Stephen Theron, “The Divine Attributes in Aquinas”, The Thomist 51, 1, January 1987, pp. 37-50.
[7] See note 5.
[8] Cf. Anthony Kenny, The Five Ways, London 1969, p.84.
[9] J.M.E. McTaggart, The Nature of Existence, Cambridge University Press, 1921 and 1927; also his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic of 1898 (available on the Internet).
[10] Aquinas, Ia 27, 1 ad 2um.
[11] We may recall G. Grisez’s criticism that Aquinas’s treatise on the finis ultimus is “not well integrated” with his moral philosophy.
[12] McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology, CUP 1901, Chapter Two.
[13] Cf. E. Lévinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961.
[14] G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopaedia 87 (tr. Wallace, OUP 1873).
[15] Ia 3, 4 ad 2um.
[16] Ia 4, 1 ad 3um; cf. F. Inciarte, Forma Formarum, Freiburg/Munich 1970, for one of the best discussions of this doctrinal structure.
[17] This, at least, is Blackfriars translation of esse… comparatur ad alia… sicut receptum ad recipiens.
[18] Hegel, op. cit., section 142.
[19] Ibid. 147.
[20] Aquinas, QD de potentia 7.
[21] Hegel, op. cit. 139.
[22] Ibid. 88.
[23] Cited from Hegel, Werke XIII, 306, in H.C. Gadamer’s “The Idea of Hegel’s Logic”, 1971, Internet.
[24] Hegel, op. cit. 89. J.N. Findlay, The Philosophy of Hegel, Collier Books, New York, 1966, pp. 145-6, resists this view of Hegel, yet at the same time admits it (pp. 158-9). Becoming “applies as much to timeless mathematical and quantitative variation” etc. he says there.
[25] Christopher Butler, In the Light of the Council, DLT, London 1968.
[26] Hegel, Encyclopaedia 50.
[27] J.M. Finnis, Aquinas, Oxford University Press 1998, pp. 301-304.
[28] B. Lonergan’s phrase. See also Axel Randrup, “Cognition and Biological Evolution”, cirip.mobilixnet.dk/evolutioncognition and the famous Lewis-Anscombe debate of long ago.
[29] Ia 44, 1; Ia-IIae 93, 4 ad 3um; Ia 115, 6, obj. 1; 75, 6.
[30] Ia 3, 4 ad2um.
[31] Leslie Armour, “The Idealist Philosophers’ God”, Laval théologique et philosophique 58, 3, October 2002, pp. 443-455; cp. Findlay, op. cit. Pp.163-164.
[32] Hegel, The Science of Logic I, Findlay’s translation from the Jubille Edition of Hegel’s works, ed. H. Glockner, Stuttgart 1927-1930, p.169.
[33] On justice in the infinite cf. Stephen Theron, “Justice: Legal and Moral Debt in Aquinas”, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Fall 2004.
[34] Cp. Aquinas IIIa 3, 7.
[35] L.-M. Régis O.P., Epistemology, New York 1959, p.213. Régis’s references to Aquinas.
[36] J.M.E. McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Cosmology 8.
[37] Armour, op. cit. p. 447.
[38] Aquinas Ia 10, 5 ad 3um.
[39] Ia 10, 5.
[40] 10, 6.
[41] Findlay, op. cit. p.41.
[42] K. Rahner, “The Concept of Existential Philosophy in Heidegger”, translated (Philosophy Today, Vol. 13, No. 2/4, Summer 1969, see p. 136) from Recherches de Sciences religieuses, Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 152-171.
[43] Cf. Axel Randrup, op. cit. (subtitled “An Idealist Approach Resolves a Fundamental Paradox”).
[44] Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (tr. Baillie), p.452 (Dover).
written by Stephen Theron
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