In this post, I want to share three puzzles I have about Thomas Aquinas’ remarks on participation. In the event that I come upon a resolution to these, which I would be eager to find, I will update this post!

But before getting into that subject, I wanted to say a few words about ‘The Greatest Philosophy Conference of All Time’ over at Purdue that I had the pleasure of attending.

It was a conference centered around the work of Paul Draper (perhaps today’s most formidable atheist philosopher), and the lineup was pretty remarkable–with thinkers like Swinburne, Oppy, Tooley, and Schellenberg. So, I got to spend most of the time just being starstruck, listening to the giants of today. In fact, as soon as I entered the hall on day one, I found myself lost in an elevator with Richard Swinburne (whose commentary throughout the conference was as hilarious as pointed). The whole experience confirmed in my mind, on the one hand, that polytheist philosophy has so much to bring to the table and, on the other, that this simply is the field for me, come what may.

Between Emerson Green’s irreplicable wit, John Buck’s far-reaching insights, and Justin Shieber’s patient and careful considerations, the company was pretty hard to beat. Add to that a true 11:11-esque coincidence of seeing a dear old friend who happened to be chairing one of the talks, and staying with a current classmate of mine.

I also don’t think I have ever spoken so much about polytheism in such a short amount of time. People seemed genuinely curious and interested. If you have never tried to condense polycentricity into an elevator pitch, you are probably wiser than I!

I shall sometime have to type up some thoughts on several of the presentations, including my favorite, Jeanine Diller’s talk on cosmological evolution and creatio ex materia. Also in the queue is an engagement with Eric Steinhart’s recent Cambridge Elements Contemporary Pagan Philosophy.

Alright, having said that, let’s turn to some puzzles!

Puzzle #1: Thomas Aquinas indicates in various places that God is that in some genus which everything else therein is by participation. But he also says elsewhere that God cannot be in any genus.

Puzzle #2: Thomas Aquinas says in many places that things participate God, and also that participation involves the participant having in one mode the very same thing had elsewhere in another mode. But this seems to imply univocity between things and God; a thesis famously rejected by Thomas Aquinas.

Puzzle #3: Thomas Aquinas believed that an efficiently causal aspect of God had to be acknowledged lest, though he would be that of which all things participate, nothing would be around to so participate. But, for things to partake of the God just is for them ‘to be’ by way of participation. Stipulating additional or pre-requisite efficient causation seems to undermine the very unrestricted extent defining of divine constitution/participation.

Puzzle #1:

You’ll note that #’s 1 and 2 are intimately related. I broke them up for spatial and comprehension purposes. In his famous 4th Way of demonstrating the existence of God given in the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas says this:

“The fourth way is taken from the gradation to be found in things. Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But more and less are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles [appropinquant] that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.”

Note Thomas’ phraseology: “the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus.” The only thing in his premises that logically licenses the deduction that God is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection, is the suppressed proposition that God is the maximum in this genus.

Now, one so inclined may immediately rejoin that it is not God as he is in himself that is in any genus, in keeping with Aquinas’ famous doctrine of Divine Simplicity, but rather the cause of graded transcendentals, which ‘all call God’. This is after all an argument quia; and so a reasoning to what is required of a cause by its effect, which effect substitutes as the middle term for the definition of the cause in the proof.

But is this not just a way to say that God is in a genus after all? Since God in some respect is truly in a genus, and every respect of God is identical to God, then God is truly in a genus. Perhaps we should say this presence is one of principle or cause rather than participant or member. But, then, we lost that premise by which we can deduce that God causes all perfection in things.

Elsewhere, in using the same form of reasoning but for the respect of God as Being, Thomas says “that thing of which a genus is chiefly predicated will be the cause of everything in that genus,” (Summa Contra Gentiles, Bk. II, Ch. 15, 3).

I do not mean to accuse someone of Aquinas’ caliber of overlooking something so blatant, but the language is for all that still very much puzzling to me.

Puzzle #2:

In the Prologue to his Commentary on the Gospel of John, n. 5, Thomas says “Still others came to a knowledge of God from the dignity of God; and these were the Platonists. They noted that everything which is something by participation is reduced to what is the same thing by essence, as to the first and highest. Thus, all things which are fiery by participation are reduced to fire, which is such by its essence. And so since all things which exist participate in existence (esse) and are beings by participation, there must necessarily be at the summit of all things something which is existence (esse) by its essence, i.e., whose essence is its existence. And this is God, who is the most sufficient, the most eminent, and th emost perfect cause of the whole of existence, from, whom all things that are participate existence (esse).”

Note his phraseology: “everything which is something by participation is reduced to what is the same thing by essence,” (emphasis). Of course, he is describing what the Platonists “noted,” rather than advancing an argument from his own principles. But, he is also describing how people came to a knowledge of God: that is the only reason it is mentioned at all. Moreover, he draws from their premises a conclusion that not only they did not, but which is unique to his system. That is, he is not merely reporting historical beliefs, but synthesizing and advancing.

If I am wrong, and this is merely a dialectical argument in which he is reasoning from the premises of others, then it seems he has inexplicably identified a case of others coming to know God with an example in which he clearly believed they did not. Why? Because Aquinas famously rejected the univocity of Being. Being is analogous, so that what we can conclude, for any relevant predicate F, is that there is something like F in God, rather than that F is in God. It simply could not be, then, that “everything which is something by participation is reduced to what is the same thing by essence,” (emphasis).

Puzzle #3:

Okay, let’s turn to the final puzzle. If things really do exist by participation, as Aquinas says, then it seems not simply that efficient causality is unrequired for their being, but impossible.

In his De hebdomadibus Boëthii, Lect. 2 (or Chapter 2, p. 19), Aquinas gives a general account of ‘participation’ as follows:

“For ‘to participate’ is, as it were, ‘to grasp a part.’ And, therefore, when something receives in a particular way that which belongs to another in a universal way, it is said ‘to participate’ in that, as human being is said to participate in animal because it does not possess the intelligible structure of animal according to its total commonality; and in the same way, Socrates participates in human … And similarly, too, an effect is said ‘to participate’ in its own cause, and especially when it is not equal to the power of its cause, as for example, if we should say that ‘air participates in the light of the sun’ because it does not receive that light with the brilliance it has in the sun.”

Perhaps we can all agree that individual beings participate Being by receiving their act of being. They do not receive Being in its “total commonality,” so, as it were, grasp a ‘part’ of it. But he will want to add to this a third term, such that this is accomplished by the ‘efficient causality’ of God (analogously understood), who, as it were, connects us to Being in general (ens commune) by creating our partial acts of being.

But, it is unclear to me at the time of this writing what the note of efficient causality is meant to add to the picture here: the ‘formation’ of the act of being is the participation event. It is not like one must first be caused to exist, and only then, at a logically subsequent state, can she participate Being: if already exists, then she already exists. Neither can it be that logically simultaneous to participating Being, one must be efficiently caused to do so: she either is participating Being, or she is not.

(Consider, too, his remarks on all of this in Summa Theologiae Part I-II, Question 52, Article 1)

So, with this, a third very puzzling area to me.