Metaphysics as Creativity

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EDITORS: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PROVINCE OF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington, D. C. ~0017 VoL. XXXIV JULY, 1970 No.3 METAPHYSICS AS CREATIVITY T HE QUESTION to which the author addresses himself is the following: is there an analogical sense in which metaphysics is creative? The answer given to the question is orchestrated by the conviction that metaphysical conclusions are truly synthetic and not analytic; novel and not tautological. To make out of nothing is an act finding no analogue within the created order. Creation, properly speaking, is the effect of God whose divine fiat makes things to be out of nothing. Secondary causes determine being in the order of specification. They do not cause to be where before there was nothing at all. The analogy between God's creative act and what we shall call here human creativity emerges when we take account of creation as existential novelty. God's creative act is so novel that paradoxically enough it adds nothing new. God plus creation does not make "two." "Before" God creates there are no beings (entia): there is only lpsum Esse Subsistens. " After " God creates there is no new esse but only an order 369 370 FREDERICK D. WILHELMSEN of entia which " previously " had not been at alP This strikingly Christian metaphysics of creation does away with every classical dualism. There is only one world, not two.2 Analogically , novelty within the immanent order of being is the contrary to the analytic order. As an intellectual operation, analytic reasoning is Aristotle's" resolution back to the causes" of a reality given the mind for scientific penetration or critical evaluation. The mind takes the given, the object, and reduces it or breaks it down to its constituent causal principles. In so doing, the intelligence traces backward that which unfolds " forward" dynamically within the real.3 This dynamic thrust must rigorously hold in check all of those contingent factors that disturb the ordered finality of the cosmos. Wherever contingency significantly alters the actualizing of finalities potentially present within a nature, that nature escapes-to the degree to which it is subject to finality-a perfect analytical resolution within the mind. In a word, the classical Aristotelian ideal of science insists upon the necessity of its object. The analytic order, therefore, is ultimately tautological, but only ultimately so. Novelty here belongs to the understanding which comes to penetrate that which is given whole and complete to itself. But there is no true novelty in the reality subsequently understood. There is only the fulfillment of ontological expectations . For these reasons predictable reality is capable of being dominated by demiurgical science. Technical power over the real is identified with the predictability of future univocal instances of a type which has already been penetrated analytically , resolved to its causes and-especially-to its final cause. Scientific mastery over the cosmos proceeds through understanding models or types of realities whose individual instances 1 The issue is argued cogently in Gerald Phelan, " The Being of Creatures," Selected Papers, (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), pp. 83-94. 2 The classic study on pagan dualism Yersus Christian creationism is Christianity and Classical Culture, by Charles Norris Cochrane (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957), esp. pp. 399-456. a Cf. my The Paradoxical Structure of Existence (Dallas: University of Dallas Press, 1969). METAPHYSICS AS CREATIVITY 871 can be expected, all things being equal, to conform to their norm. Although every being is novel as being, natures which merely unfold their potentialities analytically are not novel as natures. By novelty in this essay we mean existential creativity, that which is not reducible analytically to a pre-existent given or type and which, therefore, cannot be predicated " before " the event nor reduced to formal necessities already given " after " the event. At the risk of pre-judging our conclusions before we have marshalled the evidence, we maintain that novelty is synthesis, synthesis taken in the Thomistic sense of the term and not in the Hegelian.4 The metaphysical problem in this context bifurcates: 1) in what sense is metaphysics, as a philosophical discipline, a habit, synthetic? ~) in...