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REPLY STEVEN A. LONG DR. SCHMITZ 'S response to my criticism of his writing on receptivity is a model of the way in which philosophers from diverse traditions can enrich one another's reflections and understanding. Indeed, his observation (see his note 6) that he has always refused the honorific title "Thomist" will not impede the astute observer from discerning the extent and facility of his command of the texts of St. Thomas. Still, one must observe that the very approach chosen to articulate his metaphysical case-the metaphysics of esse as context for a view of creatures as themselves being "subsisting relations"-is, whatever its other merits, a clear departure from the realism of St. Thomas. Why? Moderns used to poke fun at Scholastic distinctions by saying that these were like attempts to answer the question "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Their point-or at least the point of those among them who were knowledgeable enough to have a point-was not that such an absurd formulation ever found currency among the various schools of Scholasticism. Rather, they sought to suggest that realist metaphysics tends to generate abstruse and unreal distinctions and questions. Now, a hard look at either continental or analytic thought reveals that this criticism is far more applicable to either than to the thought of St. Thomas. Analytic philosophy in recent years has fallen, after Wittgenstein, into abstruse discussions of what it means to have a toothache; and continental thinkers frequentlY. articulate their accounts in a vocabulary that is almost mystagogically obtuse. By contrast St. Thomas articulates the adequacy of both sense knowledge and of intellectual knowledge, always resolving both into our knowledge of being. It is in this context that one 373 374 STEVEN A. LONG takes pause at finding personalist theorists of the Communio school transignifying Thomas 's metaphysics via the dialectical absorption of substance into relation. I should like to note only three things about the proposition that the creature is a subsisting relation. These points are, I am persuaded, the critical ones for understanding the distance between the continental appropriation of Thomas and the character of Thomas's own teaching. (1) According to St. Thomas the terminus of the divine act is a being that is really related to God-not a subsisting relation. If we treat the creature as itself a subsisting relation, then is this relation itself further related-that is, do we not end up with a Platonic "third man" difficulty? Further, what is related? The divine gift of esse posits a being that is related: but its real relation does not alter the datum that we intrinsically predicate being of the creature, nor that there is a distinction between a being's total dependence upon God and its very substantiality itself. Indeed, in creatures substance and esse are really distinct, not identical. Nor is the esse merely a relation but rather a quasiformal principle of being. Created substance is really related to God; but the substance is not this relation, any more than formal causality is final or efficient causality. The idea of the creature as subsisting relation is not only unfounded in Thomas's text, but indeed contrary to his teaching. As Dr. Schmitz admits about the view that the creature is a subsisting relation, "I recognize that this term is privileged by St. Thomas for the divine persons of the Trinity." Moreover, he observes that this construction is positively excluded by St. Thomas's teaching: "I also recognize that in his argument he refers the designation human person to the individual substance and with the impeccable logic of genus and specific difference excludes subsistent relation from the term person when applied to man" (see his note 59). In short-and in precision from its further assessment-the idea of the creature as "subsisting relation" not only is not Thomas's metaphysics, but is excluded by his metaphysics. The value of viewing the creature as a subsisting relation is alleged to be its manifestation of the radical dependence of the REPLY 375 creature upon "the communicatio entis flowing from the first Being" (ibid.). But it is important that the status of...

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