The Philosophical Approach to God: A New Thomistic Perspective, 2nd Edition

Ascent to God through Participation Metaphysics

Ascent to God through Participation Metaphysics As a result, what most contemporary Thomists who think this way and yet still wish to develop an authentic Thomistic metaphysical approach to God are actually doing today is drawing not from the primarily Aristotelian side of St. Thomas’s thought, which the Five Ways express, but rather from the much richer and profounder resources of his Neoplatonically inspired participation metaphysics, the deepest and most original level of St. Thomas’s metaphysics.5 It is a personal synthesis which he constructed by (1) taking over the general formal structure of Neoplatonic participation theory, (2) emptying it of its excessive Platonic realism of ideas, (3) filling it with the new wine of his own quite original insight into the act of existence as the ultimate positive core of all real perfections—an act which is multiplied and diversi fied by reception into various limiting modes of essence, 48 Ascent to God through Participation Metaphysics 49 and (4) expressing the whole structure in a transformed Aristotelian terminology of act and potency. It is this existentialized participation metaphysics which will allow us, I hope to show, to ascend in only a few steps from any finite reality of our experience directly to God as unique, infinite Source of all reality, quite independent of any scientific assumptions from our own or any day. This same structure will also provide the ground for our ability to speak meaningfully about God in analogical language drawn from the perfections we find in creatures. The rest of this lecture will be devoted to laying out in condensed form, first, this ascent to God through Thomistic participation metaphysics and, second, the analogical language built upon it. I must warn, however, that this ancient Neoplatonic ascent of the mind from the many to the One and from the finite to the Infinite is not the type of formallogical argument that can (if indeed any argument for anything real can) force all minds to accept it with compelling logical rigor. Its power perhaps lies more in the evocation of a basic metaphysical insight which is then laid out in the form of an argument. It may be also that the efficacy of the arguments is so inextricably involved in a profound existential commitment of the living dynamism of the spirit to a truly personal quest for the full intelligibility of the universe that it can remain opaque if one stands back in a purely detached, abstract, logical perspective. The quest for the hidden Center of the universe, whose presence—or better, the exigency for whose presence—most of mankind seems to feel obscurely, dimly, and inarticulately in the ineffable recesses of their minds and hearts, may well have to be indis- 50 The Philosophical Approach to God solubly a quest of the whole person, of the whole being of a man or woman. (This does not mean that I am quietly hedging my bets and opening an escape hatch to avoid rigorous critical reflection on the arguments.) With these preliminary cautions, let us put on our metaphysical wings. First Argument: From the Many to the One The first argument I propose is, in my opinion, the simplest, most streamlined, most direct of all metaphysical arguments for God that have ever been proposed. (I mean, of course, valid arguments, since, with just about all Thomists, I consider the famous Ontological Argument—i.e., from the very concept of God to His actual existence, which is indeed briefer—to be incorrigibly invalid.) The first argument moves in a single step from the beings of our experience, taken simply as many and existing, to a single Infinite Source of all being and all perfection. I love it myself, as I am sure St. Thomas did and Plotinus in his own way before him did, but it is not always easy to share this vision. Let me first read one of St. Thomas’s own succinct versions of it—which, I might add, I have a strong suspicion that most of you, even professional philosophers, have never heard proposed as a Thomistic proof for God. In fact, in the article in question—Question 3, Article 5 of his Disputed Question on the Power of God (De Potentia)—he is not formally seeking to prove the existence of God, but rather to establish that there can be only one single Creator of...