Henry of Ghent on Aquinas and Existence

For Thomists the "real distinction" between essence and existence is a bedrock principle of metaphysics. Often (e.g. Jacques Maritain in Preface to Metaphysics et al.) a Thomist will speak as though the real distinction is one of the first and most obvious metaphysical truths that can be known. It's one of the principal "Thomistic Theses" and St Thomas uses it constantly, for instance here, in Summa Theologiae I.104.1 (For the Latin see the Logic Museum):

Therefore as the becoming of a thing cannot continue when that action of the agent ceases which causes the "becoming" of the effect: so neither can the "being" of a thing continue after that action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause of the effect not only in "becoming" but also in "being." This is why hot water retains heat after the cessation of the fire's action; while, on the contrary, the air does not continue to be lit up, even for a moment, when the sun ceases to act upon it, because water is a matter susceptive of the fire's heat in the same way as it exists in the fire. Wherefore if it were to be reduced to the perfect form of fire, it would retain that form always; whereas if it has the form of fire imperfectly and inchoately, the heat will remain for a time only, by reason of the imperfect participation of the principle of heat. On the other hand, air is not of such a nature as to receive light in the same way as it exists in the sun, which is the principle of light. Therefore, since it has not root in the air, the light ceases with the action of the sun.

Now every creature may be compared to God, as the air is to the sun which enlightens it. For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by sharing the sun's nature; so God alone is Being in virtue of His own Essence, since His Essence is His existence; whereas every creature has being by participation, so that its essence is not its existence. Therefore, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. iv, 12): "If the ruling power of God were withdrawn from His creatures, their nature would at once cease, and all nature would collapse." In the same work (Gen. ad lit. viii, 12) he says: "As the air becomes light by the presence of the sun, so is man enlightened by the presence of God, and in His absence returns at once to darkness."

Henry of Ghent paraphrases this passage in his Quodlibet I q.9, on whether a creature's essence is its being (my translation):

Those who say that in creatures the essence of a creature is one thing and its being another thing think that a creature participates in being. Whence they say that creatures are related to God as air to the sun illuminating it, for as the sun which shines by its nature, so that it is nothing other than light itself, so God has being through his nature and essence, for he is nothing other than being. And as air is of itself obscure, and of its nature is not altogether a participant in light unless it be illumined by the sun, participating through this light from the sun, so a creature of itself and of its essence does not have the character of being, but is in the darkness of nonentity, unless it be lightened by God and the being in which it participates be given to it.

After noting a different sense in which we might understand "participation", Henry goes on:

The first way of understanding the participation of a creature in being is mistaken; it is not an understanding but a phantastical imagination. For the essence of a creature should not be imagined like the air indifferent to obscurity and luminosity, but like a certain ray in itself apt to subsist, produced by the sun, not by the necessity of nature but by free will. Whence, if the sun by free will could produce a subsistent ray, that ray, inasmuch as its own nature is concerned, would be indifferent to being and non-being, and of itself would be a certain kind of non-being.

Henry goes on to explain the reason for the correction of St Thomas' image. In the image of the air being illumined by the sun the nature of the air is something different from the nature of the light or its illumination, whereas in a luminous body and the ray of light the nature of light is the same, though one light is dependent on and participates in the other. The ray which reaches our eye is not the same as the sun but is its similitude, as the creature is the similitude of God - but the air is not the similitude of the sun at all. (This seems to me to agree with the way Thomas elsewhere characterizes the essence of creatures as modes of imitability of the divine essence.) Thomas' image of the air's illumination is an image of one sort of thing being poured into another sort of thing to make it actual in a certain way, but for Henry (and, I might add, the Franciscan tradition in general along with him) existence can't be understood as a different sort of thing than the existing nature and added to it in order that it can be.

Of course, whether Henry's own account of the relation of essence and existence in terms of his intentional distinction is ultimately successful is another matter.

Wolter on Scotus on the Transcendentals and Existence

The following remarks from Allan Wolter are relevent to yesterday's post on the Cambridge Phantasists. Specifically, their equation of Thomistic esse with Scotus' univocal concept.

The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, p. 66-69:

In view of the recent trend of thought, developed principally by Maritain and to a lesser extent by Gilson, the question arises, Is this notion of transcendental being to be considered primarily existential or essential? Since this transcendental notion of being of Scotus' is, to all appearances, to be identified with the being of metaphysics, the answer to this question will determine whether metaphysics is to be considered as existential or essential, in the sense coined by Maritain. St. Thomas and Aristotle are cited as exponents of an existential metaphysics; Scotus and Plato as advocating predominantly an essential metaphysics.

In discussing this question, one important thing should be kept in mind. The problem of an essential or existential metaphysics is primarily a problem for Thomists or, more universally, for a system of philosophy which admits a real distinction between essence and existence--"a fiction," says Scotus, "of which I know nothing!" Maritain unfortunately seems to have overlooked this point in describing the "error which may be termed Platonic or Scotist." As a result, he has given us a very ingenious delineation of what Scotus might have held had he been a Thomist.

What Scotus has actually done has been to give us an essential being that has lost none of its existential import. Since the position of Scotus on this matter has been treated already by Barth, there is no need to go into detail here. We believe that Barth is essentially correct when he states that being, according to Scotus, represents primarily a quidditative notion but with a tendency or aptitude to exist. Over and above the reasons listed by Barth for the quidditative nature of being, we call attention to the fact that being pertains to the order of distinct knowledge, namely, that kind of knowledge which is expressed by the definition. Now the definition expresses the essential or quidditative elements of the thing, and being, as Scotus continually asserts, is the basic element in every essence and every definition.

This "primacy of essence," Gilson suggests, "appears in the doctrine of Duns Scotus as a remant of the Platonism anterior to Thomas Aquinas." The real reason why Scotus maintains that the being of metaphysics is a quidditative notion, however, is to be sought not in Platonism, but in the simple Aristotelian axiom that no science of the contingent qua contingent is possible. Since all existence, with the exception of God's existence, is contingent, metaphysics as a science of "existences" is un-intelligible. Existence is as little capable of serving as the "stuff of which the universe is made" as the elan vital of Bergson or the eternal flux of Heraclitus. Maritian recognizes this difficulty when he insists, like Scotus, that we must abstract from actual existence. To have a science, it is necessary to discover a necessary element in the continegent. The notion of actual existence (as we experience it) does not contain any such necessary element, but the notion of possible existence does contain an element of necessity. What actually exists (God alone excepted) is mutable, contingent and temporal; what can be is necessary, immutalbe and eternal. For this reason medieval physics could never be a science of motion, but a science of the ens mobile namely, the immediate subject of motion. Similarly, metaphysics is not a science of "being" in the adverbial sense of existing, but in the nominative sense of "a being" or the immediate subject of existence, that is, "the existible."

It is this idea that Scotus seeks to being out when he "defines" being as "that to which to be is not repugnant". To call this quidditative notion a pure essence, in the sense of Maritain, and to treat it as a sort of "least common denominator" between the real and the logical order, is an inexcusable perversion of the conception Scotus had of being. The term "to be" (esse) is to be understood in the sense of actual existence. Whenever it is to be understood of any other kind of existence, for instance, mental existence, Scotus carefully qualifies the term. He speaks, for instance, of the esse diminutum, esse cognitum, etc. He also recognized that the terms "being," "quidddity," "thing", etc. are used equivocally and can be applied both to real and logical entities. But he carefully distinguishes between the two orders. Only where the note of compatibility with real existence is to be found do we have a notion of real being or real thing. And metaphysics differs from logic precisely in this, that the former is a real science and deals with real being; logic, on the contrary, deals with logical or mental entities.