The Modality of Being

THE MODALITY OF BEING ROBERT c. BEISSEL Phoenix, Arizona " It must be of itself that the divine thought thinks." Aristotle, Metaphysics, Bk. 12, c. 9. ST. THOMAS IS AS Neoplatonic as Plotinus in his awareness that Being is not being and that being is not Being.1 Yet, like St. Augustine, St. Thomas knew that being is closer to Being than to itself; he knew that beyond the question " Why being rather than nothing? " lay another, a more baffling one, namely, " Why being rather than only Being? " That being is not Being is indisputable. The philosopher seeks to understand how, in spite of that, being is and why. How to understand being while really distinguishing it from Being without diminishing Being-such is the puzzle. The difficulty lies in finding its answer without denying or changing the terms of the question, no matter how hard those terms may be. A problem is sometimes underestimated, even by one who knows its answer, because its answer is not really understood. A school child may not think the question "Why is the earth round? " difficult, when by rote it knows that gravity causes all earthly bodies to fall to a center. Only when the child perceives that gravity may not be easy to understand does it appreciate the difficulty of the question. St. Thomas cannot be accused of underestimating the problem 1 Two notes : one on terminology and one on citations. First, " Being " here signifies ens primum, the god, the creator; "being " signifies being composed of potentiality and act, including both material and immaterial substance and accidents, ens creatum. Second, citations are given below only for points of Aristotelian-Thomistic sources which the specialist reader may want to verify or into which that reader may wish to inquire further. For the rest, it has been presumed the reader is familiar enough with the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical tradition to recognize the common doctrine of the school. 49 50 ROBERT C. BEISSEL of being. He knew that, when Being is shown to be the cause of being, a puzzling implication follows, namely, that Being is the immediate analogical cause of being. The following pages detail the problem this implication presents and the solution it finds in the work of St. Thomas. I The philosophical ancient history of demiurges and intermediate intelligences supplied to keep Being decently removed from being attests to the difficulty of understanding what it means to say that Being is the immediate cause of being. Moderns deny the existence of Being for much the same reason that ancient philosophers placed intermediaries between Being and being: the ancients thought being unworthy of Being; the moderns think being so evidently imperfect that nothing like Being could be responsible for it. Although it lacks similarly clear historical witness, the difficulty of understanding what it means to say that Being is an analogical cause of being is no less striking. Univocal causes are of the same species as their effects and, therefore, are distinct from them numerically by reason of subject or matter. But, while analogical causes are specifically different from the subjects in which their effects are wrought, the perfections they cause in them are not distinct from the perfections of those causes. Indeed , those perfections in cause and effect are identical, not just in species but in number.2 Examples may be helpful here. Agents of natural generation are univocal causes of their issue, not only in factum esse, 2 Summa Theol. 1-2, q. 20, a. 3, ad 3. St. Thomas refers to this distinction in many places, e.g., 1, q. 4, aa. 2, 3c and ad 3; q. 13, a. Sc and ad 1; q. 104, a.1; Contra Gentes, 2, c. 21; 3, c. 65; 4, c. 7; De Ver., q. 10, a. 12, ad 3; and many other places in the works cited as well as in other works. (The interested reader is best advised to look at the Tabula Aurea for the distinction under the entry Causa.) It goes without saying that all talk of "cause" here presumes an Aristotelian notion of causality, not a Humean one. All causes actually causing exist simultaneously with their effects for as...