- Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation by Gaven Kerr
At the core of Gaven Kerr’s new volume is an explanation and a defense of Aquinas’s account of divine creation. Aquinas’s basic insight on this topic is that everything other than God is dependent on God for existence but that God is dependent on nothing whatsoever. This position recurs throughout the corpus of Aquinas’s works and is a nonnegotiable aspect of the Catholic faith.
Kerr includes an analysis of Aquinas’s use of other thinkers as well as a brief comparison of his position with contemporary scientific thinking on the evolutionary development of the cosmos and on biological evolution. He defends the Thomistic position that all developments in the physical cosmos, including those of a biological character, necessarily presuppose the creative activity of God. The activity of divine creation, for Aquinas, is not simply a divine act that took place long ago and far away. By envisioning divine creativity [End Page 334] not only as what brought things into existence but also as what sustains them in existence and guides their development, Aquinas shows how every creature and every kind of creature exhibits ultimate dependence upon God.
In the first chapter Kerr considers the body of thought about the nature and origins of the cosmos that Aquinas inherited, especially through his study of the newly recovered texts of Aristotle. Chapter 1 reviews the positions taken by various Presocratic thinkers. Where they argued that all forms of being are produced from certain first principles of a material character by the operations of an efficient cause, Aquinas saw the need to consider the topic in a more universal way (that is, from the perspective of what they all share: existence) so as to supply in his account something that could bring things that do not have existence of themselves into existence ex nihilo (out of nothing).
In Plato Aquinas saw a thinker who regarded all material being as dependent on an immaterial source and who proposed a version of the doctrine of participation as an explanation for the unity in being that obtains among the multiplicity of existents. Here Kerr finds Aquinas quietly to have adapted the Platonic concept of participation (and thereby to have corrected what Aristotle so sharply criticized in the thought of Plato) by interpreting it in a way that resembles his own position: those things that do not possess being essentially must depend on God, whose essence is existence. For Aquinas, participation in existence by things that do not of themselves have existence is a vital aspect of the metaphysics of creation.
In the final portion of this first chapter, Kerr treats Aquinas’s use of other thinkers whom he found to have proposed the reality of a first cause by reasoning that without such a primary cause nothing else would exist. These philosophers include Jewish, Christian, and Islamic thinkers and their pagan Neoplatonic sources.
The second chapter features Aquinas’s argument for holding that the nature of the creator differs in kind from the natures of all creatures. Whereas the creator of beings has existence essentially and bestows esse on creatures, every creature (no matter what kind it is) is a composite of esse and essentia. The gift of esse actualizes the potency of these finite essences, which participate in (that is, depend on) the existence that God gives them in order for them to be.
In this chapter Kerr considers at length the signature Thomistic doctrine that in God existence and essence are identical. As the unique source of existence for everything else, God is not dependent on anything for existence. Kerr then relates this fundamental aspect of divine existence to Aquinas’s discussion of divine knowledge, love, and power. In Aquinas’s account of the divine ideas, God knows all the possible ways in which his essence can be reflected in his creatures, but he does not choose to bring all these possibilities into existence. The...