Being is Being-Present-to-Self: Rahner’s Key to Aquinas’s Metaphysics

BEING IS BEING-PRESENT-TO-SELF: RAHNER'S KEY TO AQUINAS'S METAPHYSICS I. Beisichsein: An Initial View WHEN CORNELIUS ERNST introduced the first volume of Theological Investigations into English, he took note of Rahner's guiding philosophical intuition , citing and translating a passage from Geist in Welt. What I take to be the foundation runs as follows: ' Erkennen ist Beisichsein des Seins, und dieses Beisichsein ist das Sein des Seienden ', ' knowledge is the being-present-to-itself of Being, and this being-present-to-itself is the Being of any entity' (p. 82) .1 Fr. Ernst :found this formula a bit hard to take, especially its second part. Lt begins by saying what the ontological structure of subjectivity is. To know is not just to have bumped into something or gotten hold of some information. All this presupposes something more primordial as its condition of possibility : a self-relaiting, self-present act of Being. "Intellect reflects upon itself," Aquinas says (S.G.G., 4, 11) .2 Hence knowledge is the being-present-to-itself of Being. But then the formula concludes: this being-present-to-itself (or subjectivity) is the Being of any entity. Apparently, Rahner is saying that subjectivity is the mode of Being not just of some but all beings. Taken as a whole the formula says, in effect, that being is subjectivity-presence is self-presence. Now while it is obviously true that subjectivity is a mode of Being and that all subj.ectivities are beings, the converse1 Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations, Vol. I, trans. Cornelius Ernst (New York: Seabury Press, 1974), p. xiii, footnote 1. 2 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Oontra Gentiles, Book Four: Salvation, trans. Charles J. O'Neil (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), Chapter 11, p. 81. 63 64 BOB HURD that ·all Being is a mode of subjectivity ·and all beings are subjectivities -does not register so easily, especially when many of these beings are not only devoid of consciousness but devoid of life a:s well. One sympathizes with Fr. Ernst's perplexity. "Put in colourful terms," he says, " this amounts to saying that every entity (every material entity too) is a more or less deficient angel." 3 Deficient angel, Ernst says, because in Thomas's hierarchy of Being the angel is essentially and immediately a self-conscious being and so is the paradigm of subjectivity in the created order. But even under the best of conditions and in the best of times one does not normally look upon the cocker spaniel or the philodendron or the inanimate material substance as a deficient angel! On the other hand, Fr. Ernst might have said more. For the drift of his remark invites illustration by way of something higher still in Thomas's hierarchy of Being. Instead of saying every being is a deficient angel he might just as well have said every being (the angel too) is a deficient God. Every being, in other words, is a deficient imitation of God " in whom," Thomas says, " understanding is not other than being " (S.C.G., 4, 11). This slight shift of perspective, which bids us consider the Being of every creature no longer from the point of view of the highest creature's mode of Being (angelic subjectivity) but from that of the ground of Being itself, puts Rahner's formula in its .true light. Now instead of absurdly and arbitrarily assigning the highest creature's mode of Being to all the restwithout .sufficient regard for the analogy of Being-the formula radically gra:sps and expresses the implications of analogy for the first time. For analogy is not ultimately about how one thing may be simultaneously like and unlike another thing in some respect. This secondary application of analogy is rooted in a more fundamental metaphysical truth: every finite being must really approximate its absolute, ground while nevertheless falling infinitely short of it. Or put in another way, the complete transcendence of the absolute ground does not make it s Op. cit RAHNER's KEY TO AQUINAS'S METAPHYSICS 65 any less immanent to the ent,ities it grounds, but in fact makes for this very immanence. If the...