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Creation and Participation: the Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas

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Creation and Participation: the Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas University of St. Thomas, Minnesota UST Research Online School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity Winter 2015 Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas Byron Stefan Hagan University of St. Thomas, Minnesota, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.stthomas.edu/sod_mat Part of the Catholic Studies Commons, Christianity Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Hagan, Byron Stefan, "Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas" (2015). School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects. 13. https://ir.stthomas.edu/sod_mat/13 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity at UST Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in School of Divinity Master’s Theses and Projects by an authorized administrator of UST Research Online. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE SAINT PAUL SEMINARY SCHOOL OF DIVINITY UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS Creation and Participation: The Metaphysical Structure of the World-God Relation in Aquinas A THESIS Submitted to the Faculty of the School of Divinity Of the University of St. Thomas In partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree Master of Arts in Theology © 2015 All Rights Reserved (Byron Stefan Hagan) St. Paul, MN (2015) 2 Table of Contents INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................................... 3 Overview: Creation and Participation in Aquinas ...................................................................... 3 CHAPTER 1. Participation: Aquinas and his Sources ................................................................ 10 1.1. Greek Theogonic Cosmogony and Pythagoreanism: the Limited/Unlimited and analogy 10 1.2. Plato: participation and the theory of Forms...................................................................... 12 1.2.1. Platonic hyper-realism: participation in the separate Forms....................................... 14 1.2.2. Plato and analogy ........................................................................................................ 16 1.2.3. The “grounding problem” in Plato: difficulties for his notion of participation .......... 19 1.3. Aristotle: the turn to the world: substantiality and formal immanence ............................. 20 1.3.1. Aristotle and Aquinas: the First Cause and participation .......................................... 22 1.3.2. The “non-Aristotelian” nature of Aquinas’ use of Aristotle’s act-potency scheme ... 23 CHAPTER 2: Analysis of Principle Texts in Aquinas with respect to the Development of the Idea of Participation in His Thought ............................................................................................. 26 Introduction: Participation and substantiality: De Veritate, q.21, a.5; In De hebdomadibus ... 26 2.1. In De Hebdomadibus: Substantiality and participation: how things are good................... 28 2.2. Summa Theologiae Ia, q. 5; q. 44: securing the convertibility of ‘bonum’ and ‘ens’ ....... 38 2.2.1. Summa Theologiae I,5: esse as universal perfection; the self-denomination of the good....................................................................................................................................... 39 2.2.2. Summa theologiae q.44: the two-tiered hierarchy of being—creator and created ..... 42 2.3. In Liber de causis, propositions 1 and 3: the intensive principle of being ......................... 45 2.4. Quodlibet II, q.2, a.1. Esse from accident to actuality: the participation-structure of being ................................................................................................................................................... 49 2.5. Summa contra Gentiles III ................................................................................................. 55 C. 64: the good ordering of the world as hierarchical participation in the goodness of the First Cause (God) .................................................................................................................. 55 C. 66: the order of causes subordinated by participation in the First Cause ......................... 58 C. 69: how by participation creatures are established as true causes in their own order ...... 59 CHAPTER 3: Participation in Thomas Aquinas and in Thomism: Esse as the Act of Being ...... 61 3.1. Participation in Aquinas: a summary overview ................................................................. 61 3.2. The different kinds of participation ................................................................................... 63 3.3. The Participatory Structure of Being: Exemplarity, composition, simple act of creation . 69 CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................................. 79 BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................................................................................................................... 86 3 INTRODUCTION Overview: Creation and Participation in Aquinas The term “participation” as we are principally concerned with it in the metaphysical scheme of Aquinas is a conceptually compact term that 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. Although the notion can be and is applied in the thought of Aquinas in a number of ways, Thomistic participation is most properly understood as the expression of the dependence relation of creatures to God,1 a relation exemplified by a metaphysical structure open to analysis by the philosopher or theologian sufficiently trained in the general science of created being, that is, 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. Aquinas’s mature doctrine of participation is an original synthesis operating on two intertwining and mutually interpreting planes of thought: the philosophical, where Aquinas synthesizes the principle metaphysical concerns of Plato and Platonism (pagan Greek, Islamic, Jewish, and Christian sources) and the critical revision of Plato that is the achievement of Aristotle;2 the theological, where the Angelic Doctor grants a metaphysical certification to key moments of Catholic dogma and the Christian tradition of Biblical interpretation in the Fathers of the Church as well as his scholastic predecessors—always with those dogmatic commitments in 1 W. Norris Clarke, “The Meaning of Participation in St. Thomas” (Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, Vol. 26 [1952], 147-157), 152. I am also deeply indebted, throughout this thesis, to Stephen A. Hipp, S.T.D.: for technical criticism and guidance as to both the form and content of this work, and for considerable tutelage on general and specific questions in the metaphysical theology of Aquinas, including sources and reception history. 2 The notion that Aristotle (and therefore Aquinas) is a revising Platonist, once a novel thesis, had received by the nineteen-sixties an imprimatur by no less an establishment figure than Frederick Copleston (A History of Philosophy, Vol. II: Augustine to Scotus, Image ed. New York: Image Books, 1985). “One [could] regard the achievement of St. Thomas, not so much as an adoption of Aristotle in place of Augustine or of neo-Platonism, but rather as a confluence and synthesis of the various currents of Greek philosophy, and of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, as well as of the original ideas contributed by Christian thinkers…This line of interpretation seems to me to be perfectly legitimate, and it has the great advantage of not leading to a distorted idea of [Aquinas’s thought] as a pure Aristotelianism. It would even be…legitimate to look on [Aquinas’s thought] as an Aristotelianised Platonism rather than as a Platonised Aristotelianism” (563). 4 view—especially as regards the doctrine of the creation of the world immediately and ex nihilo by God.3 “For us, Christians, it is indubitably certain that everything that exists in the world is created by God.”4 The idea of creation in its Christian form is a conception that pervades and controls the metaphysical thought of St. Thomas from start to finish, even though as operative meta-doctrine it remains unthematized in the texts.5 Creation for Aquinas “is the notion that nothing exists which is not creatura, except the Creator Himself...[and] this created-ness determines entirely and all-pervasively the inner structure of the creature.”6 The idea of creation and the idea of participation go together: the metaphysics of Aquinas is creationist-participatory metaphysics which, though he is a great analyzer of concepts, remains for him an “existential” mode of thought, that is, a philosophy of being (ens). 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.7 3 Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange (Reality: A Synthesis of Thomistic Thought [St. Louis,
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