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Thomas Aquinas and the Real Distinction: a re‐evaluation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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Thomas Aquinas’s doctrine of the real distinction between essence and existence in all beings other than God has been the focus of much debate among Thomists. And this is how it should be, for all agree to its central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics. Is the distinction a deduction we make from our knowledge of God’s essence, or an insight drawn from our experience? And if it is the latter, is this insight from multiplicity to unity based on the inevitable mental distinction we draw between the concept of essence and that of existence, or is it the fruit of a metaphysical penetration of the material things we meet within our world? Let us look first at the argument based on an intuition into God’s simplicity and a deduction from that intuition, and then turn to an examination of the arguments which move from the diversity of our experience to the simplicity of the source of that experience.
In the first argument, the claim is that we have a direct insight into being as being, into existence itself, that is, God. ‘Being (esse), insofar as it is being, cannot be diverse.’ If it differs, it must be by something other than it, that is, by particular essences. Is this the main-line argument for the real distinction? Many commentators (among them O’Brien and Fabro) have thought that it is. However, I believe they are mistaken. For the proof as it stands is incomplete, not in failing to offer a conclusion, but in failing to ground its major premise.
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- Copyright © 1988 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Sum. cont. Gent. II,52,(2). This way of presenting the issue is found in many places in the works of Aquinas, both early and late. See, for example, De ente. V,(3); De Pot. III,5,c; De Spirit. Creat. I,1,c; De Sub. Sep. VIII,(42) and IX,(48); and Summa Theol. I,44,1,c.
2 De Ente et Essentia, V, (3). This way of arguing the point is also found in parallel texts of other early works: De Hebdomadibus, Lect. 2; In I Sententia, d.8, q.4, a.2.
3 For a fuller account of this breakdown and references to the particular articles in question, see Patt, Walter, ‘Aquinas's Real Distinction’, The New Scholasticism 62 (1988) 1–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 ‘Existence (esse) cannot be defined.’In IX Meta., L.5, com.1825.
5 When 1 say sense experience, I do not mean bare empirical data recording, void of understanding. Such a definition of experience is unintelligible. Rather, experience is always accompanied by thought, and intelligibility always present implicitly within experience. It is the work of metaphysics to draw out this intelligibility.
6 Indeed, in his early works Aquinas shows the heavy influence of Avicennian Neo‐Platonism. See, for example, De Hebdomadibus, L.2; In I Sent., d.8,q.4, a.2&3; In II Sent., d.1, q.1, a.2; De veritate X, 12,c.
7 Summa Theol. I,50,2, c.
8 De Pot. III,17, c.
9 De Pot. VII,3. This is not the only place that Thomas argues in this way: see also, Sum. cont. Gent. 11,15; Substantiis Separatis IX,(49).
10 De Pot. VII,2, c. For similar arguments in other works, see Sum. cont. Gent. II, 15; De Sub. Sep. IX,(49); and Summa Theol. I,3,4, c.
11 Ibid.
12 Liber de Causis, prop.9. This work is a medieval compilation of excerpts from the writings of the Neo‐Platonist Proclus.)
13 De Pot. III,7, c; see also III,8, ad.19.
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