![]() But some Thomists believe that the formulation illuminates the nature of being in a way that was unavailable to earlier Christian philosophers. On the surface the Thomist assertion that the essence ( essentia) of God is identical to his existence ( esse) merely restates in scholastic idiom what the Church has always taught about the divine aseity and the contingency of the world: God is uncreated everything else ain’t. At this point the Scriptures point us to a mystery they cannot say. The proper distinction between Creator and creature cannot be adequately stated in the terms of the biblical narrative, though it first emerges and is apprehended within this narrative. What Jenson sees as a weakness of the Thomistic claim of the identity of the divine essence and existence-namely, its abstraction from the biblical story-I see as its strength. (“Creator and Creature,” Theology as Revisionary Metaphysics, pp. ![]() I agree, but I note that the Eastern doctrine that God is above Being seems to exegete Scripture with equal plausibility, which suggests a certain loose fit in both cases. For Thomas himself, the non-distinction of existence and essence in God belongs to his doctrine that God is Being. Yet I am haunted by the feeling that it also is too abstract to quite fit the biblical narrative. In my view, Thomas’ brilliant move must surely suffice for all ordinary theological purposes, and I invoke it regularly. God contains within what he is the reason that he is we do not. Not so with God: could we-as short of the Kingdom we cannot-know what God is, we would merely therein discover that he is. Simplifying greatly, we could know absolutely everything about what a putative creature would be, without knowing whether the thing so described actually exists. Essence is, of course, what something is existence, in Thomas’ here innovative use, is the fact that something is. Jenson appreciates the Thomistic contribution:Īccording to Thomas Aquinas, the difference between Creator and creature is that in the case of creatures, existence and essence are distinct, whereas they are not in God. Even a theologian as critical of Hellenistic construals of divinity as Robert W. Yet as standard and commonplace as the confession of God’s aseity may be within the tradition, many theologians find Thomas’s formulation of the doctrine incisive and fresh, even innovative. Thus St Athanasius:įor if it is an admitted truth about God that He stands in need of nothing, but is self-sufficient and self-contained, and that in Him all things have their being, and that He ministers to all rather than they to Him, how is it right to proclaim as gods the sun and moon and other parts of creation, which are of no such kind, but which even stand in need of one another’s help? ( Contra Gentes 28) He does not derive it from any other source. ![]() God possesses life, power, being within himself. The divine self-sufficiency would seem to logically follow from the dogmatic claim that God freely and needlessly created the world from out of nothing. Orthodox Christians have always claimed for the triadic Deity the attribute of aseity. The persuasiveness of the five ways, therefore, depends on our grasping the critical Thomist insight-the essence of God is his existence. Hence it is necessarily one and the same being on which all five proofs converge” ( Aquinas, p. Only a being who is the transcendent fullness of being, who is self-existent Being, can provide an answer to the question, Why does the world exist instead of nothing? “On Aquinas’s view,” Edward Feser explains, “there can in principle be only one being whose essence and existence are identical, and thus which is Pure Being. St Thomas clearly intends each proof to identify an ontological deficiency, namely, the incapacity of beings to provide a metaphysical account of their existence. Perhaps the unmoved mover of the first way is a different being than the perfect being of the fourth way … so on and so forth. ![]() Yet one might wonder whether the Angelic Doctor has demonstrated the existence of a single ultimate being. Five ways, five philosophical proofs for the existence of God. ![]()
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