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2018, The Thomist
According to Thomas Aquinas, God's essence is unparticipated and unparticipable. Yet at times, he presents 'esse subsistens', which is the divine essence, as somehow participated. This paper considers Aquinas's account of what such participation entails. It examines this question in light of a distinction he draws between three modes of participation, and it concludes that he sees God as participated according to the third of these: the manner in which an effect participates in its cause. In the course of its investigation of this mode of participation, the paper also sheds further light on Aquinas's account of participation in 'esse' taken as the intrinsic 'actus essendi' of an individual created being as well 'esse' taken as 'esse commune': the common notion of created 'actus essendi'.
2018 •
This article is the second of three essays by Fr Jason Mitchell, myself, and Gregory Doolan on the three modes of participation in Thomas Aquinas. All three articles have been published together in the 2018 Fall issue of The Thomist. Abstract: In his commentary on Boethius’s De hebdomadibus, Thomas Aquinas distinguishes three modes of participation. This article proposes an answer to the following question: Do finite beings participate in their actus essendi according to the second of these three modes of participation? I approach this question through an investigation of the criteria that identify and demarcate each of Aquinas’s three modes of participation. In section I, I detail the criterial problem for identifying and demarcating Aquinas’s three modes of participation. In section II, I address at length John Wippel’s five arguments that purport to show that Aquinas’s second mode of participation excludes the participation of ens in esse. In section III, I propose my answer to the criterial problem, which supports my claim, contrary to Wippel, that the second mode of participation includes the participation of ens in its actus essendi. I do not provide a textual analysis of Aquinas’s account of the participation of ens in its actus essendi, since I have little to add to Wippel’s perspicuous treatment of this topic. My aim is more modest. I intend to challenge and correct Wippel’s taxonomy of the three modes of participation. Said otherwise, I accept the substance of his interpretation of the participation of ens in its actus essendi. What I reject is his taxonomy of Aquinas’s three modes of participation, which restrictively forces Aquinas’s diverse orders of ens-esse participation to fit the mold of the third mode of participation, and so excludes from the second mode of participation the participation of ens in its actus essendi.
The term “participation” as I am are concerned with it in this thesis signifies the package of relations forming a structure of dependence between the manifold of inferior subjects and the higher source of their similitude or nature. Thomistic participation is most properly understood as the expression of the dependence relation of creatures to God, a relation exemplified by a metaphysical structure open to analysis by the thinker sufficiently trained in the general science of created being (metaphysics). Participation is the way in which created beings are related to God and receptive of divine causality—the most superior and most transcendental type of cause. This study, in examining key sources and some principle texts of the Angelic Doctor, will bring to light his mature doctrine of participation as a synthesis operating on two mutually interpreting planes of thought: the philosophical, where he synthesizes the principle metaphysical concerns of Plato and Platonism (pagan Greek, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian sources) with the critical revision of Plato that is the achievement of Aristotle; the theological, where the Angelic Doctor grants a metaphysical certification to fundamental Christian commitments about God: his essential goodness, radical simplicity, and his ultimate and total causal power with respect to creatures. For Aquinas, creation means that all but God is creature, and that the creaturely nature of the world definitively saturates the world and everything in it. By means of an analysis of the metaphysical structure of being and beings in terms of participation Aquinas arrives at a conception of a God who, as the first and supreme cause of the world, is both transcendent of it and immanent in it, such that the world is a manifold of created natures at once utterly under divine governance and free in their own order.
New Blackfriars
Aquinas on The Distinction Between Esse and Esse: How the Name 'Esse' Can Signify Essence2023 •
In a number of texts throughout his career, Thomas Aquinas identifies different senses of the term 'esse'. Most notably, he notes that according to one sense, the term signifies the act of existence (actus essendi), which he famously holds is really distinct from essence in all beings other than God. Perhaps surprisingly, he also notes on a number of occasions that according to another sense, the term 'esse' can signify that very principle that he says is distinct from the act of existence, namely, essence. In light of Aquinas's semantic theory, this paper investigates how he coherently holds within his metaphysical system that this term 'esse' can signify in different ways both essence and the act of existence. More broadly, what it shows is how, for Aquinas, the metaphysician can look to the modes of signification (modi significandi) of terms and as well as their modes of predication (modi praedicandi) to draw careful conclusions about the modes of existence (modi essendi) of real beings. These considerations reveal that in Aquinas's view, although the grammarian and logician in their way are also concerned with these semantic modes, it is not their job to employ them to discern the various senses of the term 'being' or the fundamental modes of being. In the end, this is a task for the metaphysician.
New Blackfriars
Grace as Participation according to St Thomas AquinasThe metaphysical notion of participation is operative throughout the thought of St. Thomas and within the Catholic understanding of the creature’s relationship to God—in particular, with regard to sanctifying grace. This is important, because without an understanding of sanctifying grace as an ontological participation in the life of God, Christians are left with the idea of justification as an external “covering over” of sin, without any real transformation taking place within the soul. Beginning with an examination of Aquinas’ views concerning the Analogy of Being and the meaning of participation, and particularly with regard to participation in God’s own esse, our paper will note the significance of the Thomistic synthesis of the Platonic understanding of participation (i.e., participant vs. that which is participated in) and the Aristotelian framework of Act and Potency, that is, a synthesis between the Platonic verticalism and the Aristotelian horizontalism, in Aquinas’ understanding, not only of creation, but also of the Incarnation and of the whole supernatural life of grace and justification.
SUMMARY The article deals with the main " Platonic " theme in Aquinas – the notion of participation which plays the crucial role in establishing the ontological unity of his worldview, known as " participational metaphysics ". A brief historical survey of some 20 th century Thomistic investigations of the field presents the classifications, made by C. Fabro and L-B. Geiger, and shows the importance of liberating the doctrine of the primacy of esse from essentialist suppositions. The article analyzes some texts by Thomas Aquinas from his Summa contra gentiles, Prima pars of Summa theologiae, The Commentary on Liber de causis, and The Exposition of De hebdomadibus dealing with the problem of causality, the conception of a thing as a composition, and the Platonic aspects of the Thomistic doctrine of creation.
PROJECT ABSTRACT In order to elucidate Aquinas’s philosophical method and rigor in arriving at his teaching of Ipsum Esse Subsistens, it is useful to refer to works such as his Treatise on Separate Substances, but above all to his Commentary on Metaphysics. Here Aquinas states that Aristotle concludes, correctly, that there is a Being in Itself and a One in Itself which is the cause of the being of all other beings, but which is not their substance, but only its own substance. According to Aquinas, this conclusion is based on the teachings of act and potency, of substance and of being understood as act, within the framework of Aristotle’s science of being qua being. Aquinas states that although Aristotle inherited the seed of this teaching from Plato, he arrived at it by a different speculative path, rejecting the temptation to conceptualize a subsistent universal being.
Are all God’s activities identical to God? If not, which are identical to God and which not? Although it is seldom noticed, the texts of Aquinas (at least on the surface) suggest conflicting answers to these questions, giving rise to a diversity of opinion among interpreters of Aquinas. In this paper, we draw attention to this conflict and offer what we believe to be the strongest textual and speculative support for and against each of the main answers to these questions.
In this paper, I will present Thomas Aquinas’ notion of participation as applied to the redemption brought by Christ. St Thomas makes use of the notion of participation in order to explain our participation in the sin of Adam. As we know from the Scriptures, it is by reason of that first sin that it was fitting that Christ became man in order to redeem all men by suffering in his nature all of the consequences of sin. Out of love for us, Jesus died on the Cross and rose from the dead in order to destroy forever both, sin and death, which are the cause (sin) and the first effect (death) of all moral evils in the world. St. Thomas also teaches that it is by our participation in the death and resurrection of Jesus that we attain redemption, through sanctifying grace while in this life, completed at the end of time through the participation in the resurrection of Christ, when those who were obedient to Him while on earth will rise to eternal life. As we were all one in Adam, it is through obedience that we are one in Christ, the new Adam.
This study examines Aquinas's interpretation of the Patristic formula "Son of God assumed the flesh through the mediation of soul". The aim of the paper is to show how the hylemorphic anthropology and the metaphysics of the act of being enables Aquinas to valorise the place of human body in the Incarnation. The paper consists of three parts: the first sketches main points of Aquinas's anthropology, the second presents St. Thomas Patristic sources, the third provides an analysis of the Question 6 of the Third Part of Summa Theologiae concerning the mode of the assumption of a human nature "according to the order."
Doklady of the National Academy of Sciences of Belarus
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