Stages and Distinction in De Ente: A Rejoinder

STAGES AND DISTINCTION IN DE ENTE*: A REJOINDER I IN A RECENTLY published article, Fr. John Wippel brings forward an interesting claim. The De Ente et Essentia of Aquinas, he proposes, has arrived at a real distinction between thing and being at a stage antecedent to the demonstration of God's existence.1 However, a number of significant historical and metaphysical tenets lie dormant in this prima facie translucent estimate of the situation. Might not a close look at some of them be in order before undertaking an assessment of Wippel's conclusion? One implicit assumption, historical in bearing, soon makes itself felt. The article seems to take for granted that mention of real or conceptual character in the distinction should have had some importance in the procedure of Aquinas, so much so that the lack of explicit designation of this character may be referred to as a "failure " (p. 294, n. 35) . Undoubtedly the problem was given sharp emphasis in later Thomistic tradition. But did it come into focus in this way in the writings of Aquinas himself? In event of a negative answer, the further question why it did not or perhaps even could not play any notable part in his thought will have to be faced. A second implicit tenet is metaphysical in character. It bears on the nature of existence. Before demonstrating that God exists can we know what existence is, in a way sufficient to determine its real implications? The presumption seems made in *Pp. 376.90-377.166. 1 John F. Wippel, "Aquinas's Route to the Real Distinction: A Note on De Ente et Essentia," The Thomist, 43 (1979), 279-295. The passag.e dealt with from De Ente, c. IV, may be found in the Leonine edition Sancti Thomae de Aquino Opera Omnia, XLIII, 376.90-377.166. 99 100 JOSEPH OWENS, C.SS.R. the article that existence can be so known before the demonstration that God exists has reached its term. But i£ existence cannot be known as having the status of a real nature in this epistemological priority, how can one cogently deduce conclusions about it, for instance that it is really distinct from what it is actuating? In a word, does not human apprehension of the nature of existence coincide with the metaphysical knowledge that God exists? Yet the claim advanced by Fr. Wippel seems to take for granted that the nature of existence is sufficiently knowable, prior to that demonstration, to permit the inference of real distinction from the finite thing in which existence is received. Can that inference at all be made before the demonstration that existence does in fact subsist as a real nature in a unique primary instance? A third implicit tenet, closely related to the preceding one, is that from the content of a concept of existence one can reason immediately or almost immediately to its conditions in reality. The implicit supposition seems to be that the concept of existence corresponds to its object in the manner of a concept originally obtained through simple apprehension of a quiddity. Shades of the ontological argument at once arise, even though here the existence, aside from the distinction, is known as real from the start. From the concept of really distinct existence the reasoning projected in Fr. Wippel's article would seem to infer a distinction present in reality, somewhat as from the nature of that than which nothing greater can be thought or of that which is infinite in every perfection an ontological argument infers existence in the real world. A fourth implicit tenet seems to be that the designation " real " adequately expresses the way things are distinguished from their being, in the metaphysical perspective of Aquinas. Yet, against the Avicennian background of the different ways in which things exist, a background that was common to the metaphysics of the epoch, a thing had to be distinct from its cognitional as well as from its real being. In the sentient cognition of a lower animal seeing a tree, would not the tree be dis- STAGES AND DISTINCTION IN· 'DE ENTE' 101·tinct from the cognitional. being it has acquired, even though no human knower were...