Suarez' Doctrine of Eternal Truths

1. Introduction

The primary aim of this paper is to offer an interpretation of Suárez' doctrine of eternal truths as found in Metaphysical Disputation XXXI, chapter XII, sections 38-47. There, following the typical scholastic style, Suárez considers and rejects several theories before developing his own. Because it is somewhat difficult to determine what view Suárez ultimately adopts, interpretations of this passage tend to vary. For example, Norman Wells suggests that the necessity and eternality of essential propositions is grounded in the intellect of the divine being. ¹ Armand Maurer and John P. Doyle maintain that eternal truths are not grounded in the being of God, but rather in the real being of the essences themselves. ² I will argue that none of these interpretations adequately expresses Suárez' project, for Suárez wants a solution to the problem of eternal truths that does not depend upon the will of the divine being and one that avoids any ontological commitment to unactualized, possible essences. ³

2. Explanation of the Problem of Eternal Truths

Suárez begins the thirty-first disputation with a proof of the identity of essence and existence in finite creatures. The key premise in his argument is the claim that, lacking existence, an unactualized essence is not a being, but absolutely nothing. ⁴ By 'being' Suárez means existing being, or a being that is created by God. ⁵ Unlike the essence of God, the essence of a creature is dependent for its being on the efficient causality of God. Prior to the creative act of God, then, the essence of a creature is not an existing being, hence not a being at all; the unactualized, possible essence is a non-being or nothing.

From the claim that a nonexistent essence is absolutely nothing, the following problem arises:

. . . si, ablata existentia, perit essentia, ergo propositiones illae in quibus praedicata essentialia de re praedicantur, non sunt necessariae, neque perpetuae veritatis . . . ⁶

An essential proposition of the form "X is f" is a proposition in which an essential property f is attributed to an object X. If there are no X's in existence, then there is nothing of which f can be predicated. It would seem, then, that the proposition, "X is f" must be false. One might maintain, however, that even though there are no X's in existence, there is an essence (of) X that has the property f. And in this way, "X is f" remains true, even if there are no X's in existence.

However, if one holds, as Suárez does, that the unactualized essence is absolutely nothing, then this solution will not work. For if there are no X's in existence, and if a nonexistent essence is absolutely nothing, then there is nothing of which the essential attribute can be predicated. Thus it appears that any proposition that purports to attribute a property to a nonexistent object must be false and so clearly it can be neither necessarily nor eternally true. Therefore, because Suárez believes that an unactualized essence is absolutely nothing, he seems to be committed to the claim that essential propositions are neither necessarily, nor eternally, true. I will refer to this problem as the Problem of Eternal Truths.

Another way to illustrate the Problem of Eternal Truths is to see that there are two seemingly inconsistent propositions:

AN: An unactualized, possible essence is absolutely nothing,

and

NE: True essential propositions are necessarily and eternally true.

Given that a proposition in which a property is attributed to an unactualized essence is false, if Suárez wants to assert the truth of AN, it would appear that he must deny the truth of NE, and, in so doing, reject the possibility of any science of creatures that deals only with necessary truths.

Suárez considers three different solutions to this problem: (What I will call) the Aristotelian Solution, the Divine...