St. Thomas Aquinas, Onto-Theology, and Marion

ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, ONTO-THEOLOGY, AND MARION* BRIAN J. SHANLEY, 0.P. The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. I T IS NOT surprising that the Revue thomiste would produce a collection of papers defending Thomas Aquinas from the Heideggerian indictment of Western metaphysics as onto-theology. What is surprising, however, is that the most significant vindication in the collection is authored by none other than Jean-Luc Marion. The reason for the surprise is, of course, that Marion's earlier and influential Dieu sans l'etre (1982) had contained a damning indictment of Aquinas as the principal progenitor of onto-theology. There Marion had argued that by reversing the Pseudo-Dionysian priority of the good over being in his doctrine of the divine names, Aquinas had moved fatally away from the God of revelation and faith, who is fundamentally Love, towards the construction of the metaphysical idol of"God" who would come to dominate modern thought. Marion's original verdict on Aquinas was that he was not significantly different from Avicenna and John Duns Scotus insofar as he accorded primacy to a human concept of being (allegedly tainted with the representational limitations of the imagination) as the horizon that dominates and determines the way in which God can appear; moreover, this conceptual priority could only be univocal and so the alleged Thomistic analogy of being collapses. God is thus objectified and subordinated to human conceptualization, the 'Saint Thomas et l'onto-theologie. Actes du collogue tenu a l'lnstitut catholique de Toulouse les 3 et 4 juin 1994. A special edition of the Revue thomiste, 95, no. 1 (JanuaryMarch 1995): 192. 617 618 BRIAN J. SHANLEY, O.P. beginning of the development that would flower into modern onto-theology. Subsequent dialogue with French Thomists, however, led Marion to modify his assessment of Aquinas. In the 1991 "Preface to the English Edition" of God without Being, Marion held out the possibility that Thomistic esse may not be the being from which God needs to liberated, identifying the latter instead with both the conceptually univocal being of modern metaphysics and Heidegger's Ereignis. Marion suggested that Thomas does not chain God to metaphysics because the esse divinum maintains a transcendent distance from the composed (esse-essentia) order of beings that is the subject matter of metaphysics (ens commune). Indeed, that distance is so great that there is "hardly" any analogy. Hence Thomas can be considered to be a proponent of God without being when the latter is understood in the sense of ens commune. Marion noted at the time that his arguments were only sketchy, however, and many critical questions remained regarding his interpretation of Thomas on such subjects as the nature of metaphysics, the transcendence of the divine esse, the analogy of being, and divine causality. The 1991 arguments are filled out and advanced in this volume's central piece: "Saint Thomas d'Aquin et l'onto-theo-logie." The great significance of this article, which provides the focus for the following review discussion, is that it is a clearly acknowledged retractatio by Marion of his earlier criticism of Aquinas. Whether or not it should be accepted as a genuine vindication of Aquinas, however, is not so clear. Discussion of onto-theology is often muddled by obscurity surrounding the meaning of the term. It therefore comes as something of a relief to find Marion beginning with a clear articulation of the Heideggerian sense of metaphysics as onto-theology in terms of three essential notes. First, God must be conceived as a part of the subject matter of metaphysics, arrived at through an analysis of the particular historical determinations of the Being of beings and grasped through a univocal concept. Second, God must be the efficient causal foundation (Begrundung) of beings as their sufficient reason. Third, God as ground must be causa sui, supremely grounding precisely AQUINAS AND MARION 619 because self-grounded. Marion's subsequent vindication of St. Thomas amounts to showing that his treatment of God does not embody any of the three constitutive characteristics of onto-theology. First, Marion shows that Aquinas does not include God within the science of metaphysics. For St. Thomas, the proper subject of...