Aquinas’ Proofs For God’s Existence by Dennis Bonnette (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 167 Aquinas' Proofs For God's Existence. St. Thomas Aquinas on: "The Per Accidens necessarily implies the Per se ". By DENNIS BoNNETTE. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972, Pp. 203. Guilders 34.50. Toward the end of his Preface to Metaphysics, after reflecting briefly on certain compact metaphysical dicta, Jacques Maritain implicitly ventured the hope that fellow realists might tap the rich veins in other metaphysical axioms. In this judicious, thoroughly documented piece of sound Thomistic scholarship, Prof. Bonnette engages in the sort of meditation suggested by Maritain as he explores the further reaches of the metaphysical principle, " The per accidens necessarily implies the per se." His examination weights the role of the principle in substance and accident, natural change, knowledge, and the classic five ways (the space allotted to this last, over 75% of the book, justifies his title). Obviously, he is not cultivating virgin territory, but a fresh perspective, bolstered by skilful technical elaboration, helps illuminate terrain that may seem, to some, overworked to the point of infertility. Part I deals with matters prior to the proofs for God. The implication of the per se in the per accidens is first verified in the substance-accident relation. An accident is, except by vicious abstraction, unthinkable and unsayable apart from its subject. This demand for the inclusion of primary being in the ratio of qualified being bespeaks a special case of the reduction of the per accidens to the per se. Accidents can be adequately subjectified only in substance because the finite number of accidents blocks an appeal to an infinite series and, more importantly, because when detached from their subject accidents are existenceless. Thus every "accident is termed per accidens because existence is not proper to its essence." But it is in searching for the principles of process that Aquinas explicitly invokes the dictum, "Everything which is per accidens is reduced to that which is per se." It is not enough to settle the Eleatic crux by arguing that something comes to be from being and nonbeing in a per accidens manner. We have to turn to primary matter as a per se principle of being-in-themaking , and at this point there emerges the reason for the need for the reduction: the per accidens cannot enter into the make-up of a thing; only the per se constitutes a nature. The principle, furthermore, is significantly at work on the sensory and intellectual planes. Concomitant with and reducible to per se sensibles are per accidens sensibles, whose direct intellectual grasp is assigned to the cogitative power. According to Bonnette, here following his mentor, Joseph Bobik, the mind first lays hold of being taken as something-there, with the result that all other natural concepts are resolved into this analytically primary notion and must be considered per accidens in this sense. Corresponding to the role of being in the first operation is the function of the principle of noncontradiction in the second 168 BOOK REVIEWS operation. Because their intelligibility hangs on this " firmest principle " that is per se, all other propositions are rated per accidens. In the third operation immediately known propositions enjoy a per se status. Insofar as they are caused by these indemonstrable propositions, i.e., come to be per aliud, conclusions are taken to be per accidens statements. To support these unexpected cases of reduction Bonnette turns to De Pot., q. 10, a. 4: "... whatever things are in anything per se either belong to that thing's essence, or flow from its essential principles ... everything that is in anything per accidens, because it is extrinsic to its nature, must be found in that thing by reason of an exterior cause." Conclusions , it is true, are coercively true propositions in virtue of the mediately necessitated link between subject and predicate, but inasmuch as they are produced by indemonstrable premises, known per aliud, they are counted per accidens. If the per aliud is equivalent to the per accidens, we are bound also to designate as per accidens concepts concretely other than being and propositions dependent on "A cannot be non-A." Thus far we have been dealing with the per accidens in a relative sense, i.e...