EXISTENTIAL THOMISTIC METAPHYSICS(A 20th Century Reading of Thomism)

In 1974, contemporary Thomists celebrated the 700th death anniversary of Thomas Aquinas. This celebration also marked a century-long Thomistic revival. Its works included an attempt to produce a critical edition of St. Thomas’ writings, a historical analysis of his sources and major commentators, a systematic development of his thought, and finally, an encounter between Thomism and contemporary philosophy. But the greatest achievement of this Thomistic renaissance was the rediscovery of the true meaning of St. Thomas’ metaphysics. Contemporary Thomists like Maritain and Gilson, de Finance and Fabro, uncovered what could be called Thomas’ existential metaphysics.

St. Thomas’ metaphysics is profoundly existential.1 The whole center of gravity in his explanation of being has shifted from essence and form—what things are—to the underlying act of existence. The central role of existence not only distinguish St. Thomas’ metaphysics from his Aristotelian and Platonic sources, but was the very heart of his creation of a far reaching and original synthesis.

Metaphysical Revolution of St. Thomas

Metaphysics of Being (Metaphysics of Essence). For Plato, “being” always meant form or limited intelligible essence from which all other existents in the world are but mere representations or mere shadows of it. This is what was really real. For Aristotle, being was substance which is constituted by form and matter. It was the essential form or essence that was responsible for the whatness of a thing, or that which makes it what it is. The essence, also the principle of intelligibility, is what was real in the full sense of the term. It was the ultimate principle of metaphysics.

Throughout the succeeding periods in the history of metaphysics, metaphysicians have tried to grasp the truest idea of being. But they have tended to analyze being and its intelligibility in terms of form and essence, that what-it is of a being. The aspect of actual existence is ignored or if acknowledged is brushed under the rug without any further development. They all take existence for granted and forget about it, and proceed to examine what things are like and how they work. Even Aristotle, committed realist that he is, proceeds to carry on his entire analysis of being in terms of substance, form and matter, change, and causes. Thus, as Etienne Gilson said “philosophies in the past have advocated a metaphysics of

1 This is a 20th century understanding of St. Thomas. Yet, one of his great disciples, Banez, the Spanish Dominican, a commentator, caught it early in the 17th century, but could not get the other commentators and Dominicans to share it. So once in great frustration he cried out, “St. Thomas cries out existence, existence, and the Thomists refuse to listen.” The essence and existence distinction was there, but not the highlighting of existence as the guts, the perfection of everything.

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being minus existence. Nobody has cared to posit existence in being as a constituent element in being.”

But Thomas had a revolutionary metaphysical insight in which he saw that form or essence itself was not the ultimate principle of being. There is something more basic, more fundamental than essence or form. For St. Thomas one can still go beyond Aristotelian question, What makes a thing what it is?, of which the answer is essence or its quidditas. One can still ask further, What makes a what to be ultimately a what?, or What is the whatness of what or the essence of essence? It cannot be a particular what, for no particular what or essence can be the foundation of many different essences. Essences cannot explain each other. Hence, the explanation must be rich enough to encompass all essences. St. Thomas found the answer in the act of existence, or existential presence by which things are actually are at all, according to the various modes in which they are.

Hence, St. Thomas shifted the center of gravity from essence and form to the act of existence as the most profound component of all reality. He developed this principle using the Latin word for the act of existence esse. And by anchoring his metaphysics to esse Thomas was moving the whole body of metaphysics to an entirely new ground, and thereby transformed the whole essentialist perspective which had considered essence and form as the ultimate principle of metaphysics. He brought essence into a relationship with a higher principle—the act of existence. For existence is what actualizes essences so that essences actually are; they exist. Form, or essence, or the whatness of things is then seen as a capacity to exist. If essences were to be compared to different colors, then, existence would be the sunlight that contained them in a higher way. This is a completion of Aristotle that leaves the best of Aristotle, but encompasses it in a wider and deeper synthesis.

This metaphysical revolution inaugurated by St. Thomas displaced essence from the center of the metaphysical stage and the much more mysterious reality of esse takes its place.

Esse. As mentioned, St. Thomas developed his existential metaphysics by using the Latin word for the act of existence, esse. Esse cannot be an idea, concept, a what. It is not essence or form. It possesses an ontological richness that goes beyond the whole order of essence. In this sense, esse is a no-thing. John Caputo in his Heidegger and Aquinas says:

Insofar as esse is something other (aliud) than essence, it cannot be treated in the manner of an essence (ST, I, 29, 2, ad 3). Essence is what is signified by the definition of a thing, which means that esse falls outside the realm of definition. It is impossible to ask why or to say “what” esse is. For it is the essence which answers the questions, “What is it?” (Quid sit?). Essence is constituted by form…But esse is in no wise a form…though esse is the perfection and actuality of all forms, it itself is not a form (ST, I, 4,1 ad 3).

Caputo further states the paradox of esse:

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St. Thomas’s notion of esse tends to surpass metaphysics,…it cannot be contained within the boundaries of metaphysical discourse…It is this paradox—namely, that at the heart of this Scholastic metaphysics, this creature of metaphysical reason, there should be found the wholly noncenceptualizable notion of esse… For it is precisely the need of the intellect to formulate conceptual definitions which the Thomistic doctrine of esse frustrates. Reason is at home with form, structure, definition; but esse is none of these.

Thus we find embedded in the heart of Thomistic metaphysics an enigmatic and a non-conceptual element—esse. But what is esse if it is not definable and if it does not even permit the question “What?” to be raised in its regard? How then are we going to understand esse since it is not conceptualizable nor definable? Clearly there must be some other way of access to the meaning of esse, a meaning (intelligibilitas) which is not conceptual (conceptus).

Perhaps we can begin by being attentive to those which are, that is, to beings. Perhaps by that, we can have a glimpse of the mystery of the act of existence.

Being. All things are, and at the same time, they are also “something.” Each thing is differentiated from other things due to its nature which “specifies” it. When asked about what that thing is, we reply by saying that it is a book, a table, or a dog. These names express what beings are, that is, their essence. It is that which identifies them, independently of any accidental or changeable qualities they may have. Essence therefore can be defined as that which makes a thing to be what it is. All things have the act of being (esse), by virtue of which we call them beings (entia). The essence of things implies a mode or manner of being, a specific way of being of a thing.2

Two constituent principles are therefore present in every reality in the universe in the universe: the act of being and the manner of being (essentia in Latin). These are two necessary and inseparable components of every being that exists in the world. The universe is a harmonious unity of various realities having esse a common property, but which are at the same time specifically differentiated according to a variety of essences or natures.

In ordinary life the term and what it signifies is so all-pervasive that we become so used to it, take it for granted, lose our explicit awareness and appreciation of its richness and wonder. Existence is simply a predicate we give to each of the things around us, and then think no more about it. Thus we fall into what Heidegger calls, “the forgetfulness, oblivion, of Being.” We get so wrapped up in what things are and how we can use them that we let the basic wonder, “the wonder of all wonders, that anything is at all” to drop out of our consciousness. The metaphysical mind must recover this explicit awareness of being itself, the being of beings, instead of being absorbed in being as thises and that’s. This explicit reflective insight into being as being or the intuition of being by which we glimpse the inner depths of this mystery of existence is what makes the Thomistic metaphysician.

2 Tomas Alvira, et.al., Metaphysics, Sinag-tala Publishers, Inc.: Philippines, 1991.

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Intuition of Being: Soul of Thomistic Metaphysics

Intuition. In the modern sense, intuition is a direct or immediate knowledge, a seeing. But it also has another allied meaning in which it signifies a spontaneous knowledge that wells up in us without following the normal pathway of reasoning. Intuition, in this sense, meant to know without reasoning, to make a correct judgment without discursive preparation, a more spontaneous exercise, not of any extra or infra-intellectual faculty, but of the intelligence itself. We know and truly know but not by means of discourse and reason.3

Intuition is a very simple sight, superior to any discursive reasoning or demonstration because it is the source of demonstration. It is not opposed to discourse or ratio, for discourse starts from intuition and ends in intuition, for when all is said and done, the intellect is made to see. Moreover, it is a sight whose content and implications no words of human speech can exhaust or adequately express.

Intuition of Being. The intuition of being is the knowledge of being in which existence is coming to the forefront. It is a glimpse of the positive abundance and richness of this reality we call existence, and the central role it plays in the metaphysics of St. Thomas. It is the soul of the metaphysics of St. Thomas since it is the living experience out of which metaphysical reflection and conceptualization has to emerge. And it is this intuition that according to Maritain makes the Thomistic metaphysician. No intuition, no Thomistic metaphysician.

But what is the content of the intuition of being?

Mystery of Being4

These two words—essence and existence—are the best way to explore the content of the intuition of being. Their surface meanings are very easy to grasp. Essence is what a thing is, and existence is that it is or that it exists, and what a thing is is not the same as that it is. There are two distinct attitudes of mind involved, one when we name something and the other when we assert that it exists. The “what” and the “that” form two basic ways in which our mind tries to make sense of the things around us, or put in another way, they are two distinct aspects of things that the mind grasps and tries to come to terms with.

Yet, usually, essence is in the forefront. This is the face things present to us. We distinguish one thing from another and even oppose one thing to another. An elephant is not a

3 Mysticism, Metaphysics and Maritain: On the Road to the Spiritual Unconscious http:www.innerexplorations.com/catchmeta/mm1.htm4 God, Zen and Intuition of Being, Chapter II.

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carrot, and we don’t expect anyone to confuse the two. But we rarely if ever stop and consider the ultimate nature of the whats we are constantly making use of.

What makes an elephant an elephant must be different from what makes a carrot a carrot, or else they would be the same. But what makes a what to be ultimately a what? What makes a what ultimately to be a what cannot be a particular what, or else all whats would be the same, and we know this is not true. In short, what if we asked an admittedly very strange question: what is the whatness of whats, the essence of essences? What makes a what to be a what? It cannot be a particular what, for no particular what or essence can be the foundation of many different essences.

If we seriously ask ourselves about the whatness of whats or the essence of essences we can travel to the brink of the intuition of being by upsetting our facile complacence that says we really know the things around us. And metaphysics is meant to instruct us in these kinds of things, and so we will look at the answer of St. Thomas as Maritain presents it, but just reading the words is no guarantee they will make sense. They are meant to be read in the light of the intuition as an explanation of it.

If essences do not contain their own final meaning, the only place left to look for it is in that other fundamental stance towards reality by which we assert that something exists. But this time we have to go beyond the common sense notion of existence applied to each essence as a final boost that brings the pre-existing essence into actual existence.

If essences cannot explain each other, then the explanation must be rich enough to encompass all essences. If we are forced to look to existence for an explanation of essence, then the one thing that existence cannot be is an idea, concept, what, essence or form. In this sense, existence is no-thing. It must possess an ontological richness and density that goes beyond the whole order of essence. Existence is not simply a limit that we asymptotically approach, but it is the most real of all reality. St. Thomas wrote in his Summa Theologicae: "Existence itself is the actuality of all things, even of the forms themselves." (Saint Thomas, QIV, a. 1, ad 3) The intuition of being is not only a realization of the non-essential nature of ultimate reality, it is a glimpse of the positive abundance and richness of this reality we call existence.

What, then, is the essence of essence? It is a certain capacity to exist. Maritain calls essences "positive capacities of existence" (Maritain, A Preface to Metaphysics) and says: "the very intelligibility of essences is a certain kind of ability to exist." (Maritain, Existence and the Existent) Essence is a certain capacity to exist. It stands in relationship to existence as potency to act, and essence is the potentiality for a certain degree of existence. Existence is what actualizes these different potentialities so that there are actually existing things. Existence is an act or energy whose richness exceeds the whole order of essence and founds it. It admits being

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realized in this and that way because it exceeds every particular manifestation. "Existence is perfection par excellence, and as it were the seal of every other perfection... Doubtless of itself it says only positing outside of nothing, but it is the positing outside of nothing of this or that." (Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge)

The intuition of being is a perception of the transessential amplitude of existence in relationship to essence. What existence posits is not an accidental quality added to a somehow pre-existing essence. Essences do not exist in themselves. They do not have any actuality. They only exist in relationship to existence as potentialities for existence. The ultimate root of their intelligibility lies not in themselves but in what Maritain called the superintelligibility of existence.

Talk about essence and existence should not hide from us the fact that they are intellectual realities. We do not bump into an essence in the street, nor do we have some vision of existence. We are part of a world of existing things, existents, beings, and our minds find in these existents the two dimensions of essence and existence. Essence and existence are found there because they are actually there. They are not merely intellectual constructs. At the same time, the way they exist in the mind is not the same as the way they exist in things. This point becomes critical when we try to understand the nature of the intuition of being. There is a dynamism involved in this intuition that has its origin in the confrontation of the mind with existing things. The mind attempts to go beyond the level of essences. It sees that there is another dimension which it can provisionally label as existence and it tries to give a positive content to this dimension of existence and not simply to assert that it is beyond essence, and this positive content can best be called an insight into being as being.

When the mind turns towards the notion of existence as the source and plenitude against which all essences are measured, each essence is then seen as a refraction, a reflection, of this reality which is to be. The mind desires to grasp and disengage in its naked intelligibility this reality of existence. It wants to see this sun which contains all the colors of the spectrum of essences, but it cannot do it. Perhaps its very attempt to grasp existence is doomed to failure, for it is an attempt to turn existence into another essence, a super-essence, but existence is of a different order than this. The moment of the intuition of being is a moment where the mind is suspended between two worlds. It has overcome the diversity of essences and has seen how they converge towards the pinnacle which is the very act of existence in itself, disengaged from any limitation and reception by essence. But it cannot fully follow these converging paths. The unity it discovers is an imperfect and relative unity due to the spiritualizing power of the mind. (8) It rests on the foundation of the many whats we see that actually exist. It grasps in each existent the act of existence that actualizes and fills this capacity to exist. It moves from this limited act of existing to an intuition that the act of existing overflows all the possible modes of reception. We can grasp how existence is the actuality of all the forms, but we cannot grasp it in its deepest self

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where we would see that it is perfectly one and the source of all things. We grasp existence as transcending the limitations it has by being received as the existence of this or that particular capacity to exist, but we do not grasp it as totally unreceived and unlimited in itself.

No matter how we strive, our intuition is an intuition of both essence and existence, this time as disengaged from this or that particular existing thing and thus manifesting the transessential amplitude, of the act of existence, but only in an imperfect way, always turned toward the existent from which it has been born. The intuition of being touches the act of existence and releases its transcendence in relationship to all essences, but it cannot penetrate to the perfect unity of existence.

If essence finds its ultimate meaning in relationship to existence, why does Maritain insist on speaking of an intuition of being rather than an intuition of existence? Being is that which is. It is what is, essence existing. Why not simplify things and speak only of existence?

Imagine each existing thing as a bar magnet with essence as one pole and existence as the other, and imagine all the magnets being arranged in a circle with the existence pole of each pointing towards the center. What makes all these individual beings alike? It is not their essences, for that is what makes them different. Neither is it their individual acts of existing, for those acts, which are the actualization of various capacities, are different from each other. But each of these beings is made up of both essence and existence and each of them is oriented toward the same center.

We ordinarily look at the circle of beings from the outside and are confronted with the diversity of things. We see beings especially as being different from each other, as essences. But if we ponder the meaning of essence and ask what is the essence of essence, we begin to be led inside the circle. Each being points towards the center. The notion of being must in some way be richer than that of any individual being. It has to embrace essential differences. A stone and a flower are both beings. By the intuition of being we enter into the circle of beings and form a new concentric circle of being as being. We discover the common inner consistency of each being, that is, its relationship between its essence and its existence and the common orientation they all possess towards the center of the circle.

This discovery is an intellectual act of the highest intensity. Maritain called this intuition of being, a process of eidetic visualization by which we leave behind the empirical existence of the individual and grasp the intrinsic nature of being as being. In doing so we have reversed our perspective and look at things no longer from the point of view of essence, but rather from the point of view of existence. Or, more precisely, we see beings not as essences existing, but existing essences. We see beings with their face of existence turned towards us.

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But despite the mind's supreme effort to reconcile the two basic facts of essence and existence, its success in the intuition of being is imperfect and relative. Being as being is an imperfect unity glimpsed by the mind but shattered when we leave the mind and look at concrete existing things...But there is a deeper reason why our intuition of being is in need of completion. It has not reached the center of the circle. Existence has not been completely disengaged from essence and discovered in all its purity. We have glimpsed being as being, that inner relationship of essence to existence, that can be realized in each individual in essentially different ways, but the whole weight of this intuition is attracted towards the center of the circle, towards existence itself. The intuition of being is drawn towards becoming an intuition of existence, but it never attains this goal but is suspended in a sometimes painful tension towards it. 

Center of the Mystery of Being5

The intuition of being if cultivated leads us to metaphysical contemplation. It is a contemplation that gazes into the very ontological depths of things where the very what or essence of things shows its deepest face, which is existence. And this existing essence, this existent, draws us further to the center of the mystery of being where God dwells.

It is within the context of the intuition of being that the question of the existence of God must be placed. Without this intuition, the conceptual statements that are framed to prove the existence of God will remain flat and unconvincing. Logic alone does not have the ability to make us see. St. Thomas could never have imagined a metaphysics without God at the center of it, and God is not something added to it from the outside for religious reasons, out of some misplaced piety. God is not superimposed in his metaphysics but is the very heart of the intelligibility of his metaphysics. It emerges at the absolute center of Thomistic metaphysics as we pursue the most obvious of facts, the what and that of things to their final conclusion.

“Existence is itself varied and admits all the degrees of ontological intensity according to the essences that receive it.” But existence received demands existence unreceived. Every essence is a positive capacity for existence, but these positive capacities could not receive existence if there were not something that is existence unreceived by essence, existence itself.

In 1947 in an essay, A New Approach to God, Maritain shows how the intuition of being has at its heart God’s existence. It can start with an awareness of the fact of existence:

“…I suddenly realized that a given entity, man, mountain, or tree, exists and exercises the sovereign act to be in its own way, in an independence from me which is total, totally assertive and totally implacable..(an) existence of which I have positively no part...”

5 Mysticism, Metaphysics and Maritain: On the Road to the Spiritual Unconscious http:www.innerexplorations.com/catchmeta/mm1.htm

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But at the same time, this implacable existence (of this given entity) makes me aware of my existence as riddled with “loneliness and frailty” which is “the death and nothingness” to which my existence is liable.” Then this same intuition which had moved from “sheer objective existence” to “my existence spoiled with nothingness inexorably arrives at “absolute existence” for “being-with-nothingness,” as my own being is, implies “Being-without-nothingness.”

Here Maritain attempts to illustrate the diverse moments of the single intuition of being.

The intuition of being, both as a way of seeing and in its content, finds its supreme object in God. Neither Maritain nor St. Thomas before him would ever say that by this intuition we see God directly, but rather we know him through the prism of creatures. Everything that exists around us by the simple fact that it does exist in this or that particular way, points to Existence itself. If we can see clearly and deeply enough we can know that God exists, but this is a knowledge that does not deliver God up to us, but starting from the mirror of creatures, rises to a knowledge of God which, while certain and true, is swallowed up in the darkness where God dwells. If we push our knowledge of things enough we will arrive at a genuine knowledge of God, but because this knowledge starts from the limited things around us it is wrapped up in a mode of signification that is limited and cannot be directly and immediately applied to God. We must distinguish between "what is signified" and the "mode of our conception".

What does this mean when it comes to being itself? Our knowledge of the being of creatures leads us to say that God is a being, but we must immediately qualify this statement. God does not have essence and existence like we do. His existence is not received and limited by his essence. His essence is not a certain positive capacity for existence; his existence is unlimited and unreceived and is identical to his essence. We are correct in saying that from the existence of creatures we can know that God exists, but this does not deliver into our hands a direct knowledge of God, but rather what Maritain calls an uncircumscriptive knowledge in which we see that the essence-existence structure found in creatures demands existence in all its purity, but we do not see God in his essence. In short, we have a very precious but limited knowledge of God.

Further, if I am a person, someone who knows and loves, then God must be a person as well, but in some way too wonderful for me to grasp. And the intuition of being "normally carries along with itself another intuition, the intuition of my own existence or my Self, the intuition of Subjectivity as Subjectivity. Now Subjectivity, insofar as it is Subjectivity, is not an object presented to thought, but rather the very wellspring of thought a deep, unknown and living center which superabounds in knowledge and superabounds in love, attaining only through love its supreme level of existence, existence as giving itself... And not only does he know, by virtue of his primordial intellectual grasping of existence, that God exists and is the absolute Being, the self-subsisting Esse. He also knows that because of this very fact, God is absolute ontological

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generosity, the self-subsisting Love; and that such transcendent Love inherently causes, permeates and activates every creature, which in answer loves God more than itself."

It is in understanding the inner movement that gives birth to this kind of knowledge of God that we have finally arrived at the proximate means of understanding metaphysical contemplation. In a postscript to his last metaphysical essay, "No Knowledge without Intuition", Maritain explains the nature of metaphysical contemplation. It is in metaphysics that the intuitivity of the intellect finds its highest natural exercise. And when someone has developed this metaphysical insight especially by directing it towards God, "metaphysics culminates in a kind of contemplation that could be called philosophical contemplation and which, as in all contemplation, comprises a certain superior sort of intuition."

How does this philosophical contemplation come about? "When the philosopher does not content himself with naming such and such uncreated perfection giving it a quick nod before passing to the next, but sets himself to meditate on it and what he knows of divine things, he experiences that his intelligence and all his ideas are surpassed by them and are disproportionate to them; and the more he fixes his spirit on the ideas that make him know God, the more he experiences the devouring power of this surpassing and disproportion and of the night in which - at the instant when the signs here below, which proceed from him, make us utter his name - God hides from our human eyes."

This kind of contemplation can be accompanied by a natural love of God and a fear of trembling closely related to adoration. But it is a contemplation which does not bear directly on God, "but on that which happens in the knowing subject and on the disproportion of his concepts in regards to the object he knows." (100) But if intuition must somehow have a rapport with the object known, which in this case is God, then how does it take place? Our natural metaphysical knowledge of God is both a knowing and an unknowing. We know that God exists and that his essence is his existence, but we cannot see this existence. Every created thing with the whole force of its being points to God but as we follow these pointers we are swallowed up in darkness.

All the elements of Maritain's metaphysical development find fulfillment in this doctrine of metaphysical contemplation: his apprenticeship with Bergson, the metaphysical experiences of Raissa, the philosophical demands implicit in faith, the metaphysical doctrine of St. Thomas with its primacy of existence or esse, and Maritain's own discovery of the subjective dimension of metaphysics. This last element, while momentarily neglected today, may well be one of his greatest achievements. A serene objectivity was the hallmark of the philosophy of St. Thomas without a word about how he personally came to his revolutionary insight on the role of esse. But Maritain, heir at once to the modern sense of subjectivity and to the metaphysics of St. Thomas, made conscious for the first time the inner personal requirements for metaphysical activity which

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he summed up under the heading of the intuition of being. And it is this intuition that allowed him to attain such a deep grasp of that contemplation which is the crown of metaphysics.

Maritain was always fond of diagrams so I am going to risk creating one of my own in order to illustrate what he meant by metaphysical contemplation.

We usually experience the things around us as if we are standing at position (A). This is the essence face of the circle of created beings. From this perspective we see a bird or a tree or a stone. We focus on the differences among things. A bird is a bird and it is not a tree. We live in a world of essences (existing) but existence is bracketed and we have no yet averted to it for itself. We notice it in the form of Maritain's first concept of existence in which we say, "Here is a bird" or "There is a tree". Existence means no more than being present; we have not yet unleashed the intelligibility of existence.

With the intuition of being, we move to the inner circle of the universe of creatures (B) which is their existence. We then see that essence is not the ultimate principle of a thing. An essence is a certain capacity for the act of existing. Now we see existing essences. The previous emphasis on the diversity of things is replaced by a sense of their unity. This bird is a being and this tree is a being. And this being and that being, this act of existing and that act of existing, demands Existence itself. "The analogical infinity of the act of existing is a created participation in the unflawed oneness of the Ipsum esse subsistens." (102)

Finally if we concentrate, no longer on the existence of creatures, but the whole thrust of this existence which points to Existence itself, then we arrive at metaphysical contemplation. We concentrate on the center (C). The very essence-existence structure of things, existence received

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by essence, impels us to affirm that Existence unreceived must be at the center of the universe of creatures. But we don't see it and know it directly. It is a secure knowledge -for it is founded on the most evident and basic of facts - but it is a knowledge wrapped in darkness. But the more we cultivate this intuition of being centered on God, the more we realize that this darkness is not the darkness of mere negation and emptiness, but is a darkness of a light too bright for our minds to comprehend. Our negative knowledge becomes a powerful symbol of the richness of God's existence and our intellects are in awe at this dark yet luminous abyss.

Metaphysical Conversion

In ancient and medieval times, metaphysics was the queen of the human sciences. It was the way humans tried to come to grips with the ultimate nature of reality and the existence and attributes of God. Following the classical tradition, Thomistic metaphysics is the working of the human intelligence at its deepest level. Its subject matter may be profound as it is, yet, it begins with the most basic facts of the world of common experience. It starts from the fact that things exists. Its natural and spontaneous beginning is in seeing a flower or the flight of a bird, or a smile.

The basic facts that are at the beginning of metaphysics are so accessible. The fact of existence is all around us, but our intellectual sight is too weak to grasp what is right in front of our eyes. Our very familiarity with reality has rendered it banal. We are not attuned to hear the mystery of existence that all things are murmuring. Maritain compares the object of metaphysics to Edgar Allan Poe’s purloined letter; it is perfectly hidden because it is brazenly put right in front of us: “The little word is, the commonest of all words, used every moment everywhere offers us, though concealed and well concealed, the mystery of beings.” 6(GZI, Ch.I).

Subjective Requirements7. Maritain indicates two basic disposition that smooth the way for the reception of this intuition. The first is a sensitivity to the actual existing world around us. This means an immersion in the concrete world of things by means of our senses. But if we desire to be metaphysicians we must be “keenly and profoundly aware of sensible objects” and we must be plunged into existence, steeped even more deeply in it by a sensuous and aesthetic perception as acute as possible and by experiencing the suffering and struggles of life. This is the antithesis of a scholasticism which is purely academic, the simple transmission of concepts without a living sense of the reality they refer to.

6 God, Zen and Intuition of Being

7 GZI.

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The second necessary disposition for attaining this intuition is to be still enough to listen to the mystery of being that is whispered by all things. This intuition demands, not an intricate intellectual technique, but rather an “active attentive silence” and “a degree of intellectual purification” by “which we become sufficiently disengaged, sufficiently empty to hear what all things whisper and to listen instead of composing answers.”

Two Pathways. How do we arrive, then at this indispensable metaphysical intuition? Maritain describes two ways: (a) one is by way of experience wherein some concrete event triggers the intuition. The other and probably much rare, is (b) by way of judgment.

By Way of Experience. To be a good metaphysicians, one must have not merely an abstract conceptual understanding of the meaning of the term and how it is used, but an existential awakening or the awakening to being to realize or savor what being means in the concrete. There are various personal paths to this:8

1) Threat of loss of one’s own existence or that of a loved one—realization by contrast; 2) Intense love experience: How wonderful that so and so is real.3) Intense hope, longing, at last realized: At last it is real!4) Contemplative wonder of child, poet, artist, scientist: e.g., at the beauty, order of the

universe (characteristic experience of classical mind—Greeks and Romans), and even deeper at its presence at all;

5) Profound religious experience: gratitude for creation as a gift (characteristic of early and medieval Christians);

6) Radical boredom, despair, existential anxiety: puts existence itself in question, awareness of radical contingency, precariousness of our existence as poised over nothingness, “surrounded by nothingness” (e.g., Heidegger, for whom the awareness of being is inseparable from awareness of nothingness: das Nichts. (This is the characteristic path of many contemporary people for whom the religious sense is weak.)

By Way of Judgment. This happens when the strength of our reasoning can lead us inexorably to a peak of tension that is resolved by a moment of insight. Raissa Maritain described one experience as she watched the forests glide by her car window:9

“I was looking out of the window and thinking of nothing in particular. Suddenly a great change took place in me, as if from the perception of the senses I had passed over to an entirely inward perception. The passing trees suddenly had become much larger than themselves, they assumed a dimension prodigious for its depth. The whole forest of symbols, and seemed to have no other function than to signify the Creator.”

8 W. Norris Clarke, Central Problems of Metaphysics.

9 GZI

14

Perhaps the inner questioning that permeated the life of someone like Raissa becomes focused and creates a fleeting pathway to being. Then the alluring palpability of the concrete gives way to another dimension, the inner world of metaphysics. What is this world like? It is the task of metaphysics as a science to attempt to conceptually articulate what is given in intuition.

Book References:

Caputo, John. Heidegger and Aquinas: An Essay on Overcoming Metaphysics. New York: Fordham University Press, 1982.

Norris Clarke, W. Explorations in Metaphysics. London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994.

Internet Sources

http://www.innerexplorations.com/catchmeta/mmm1.htm http://www.innerexplorations.com/catew/gz1.htmhttp://www.innerexplorations.com/catew/gz3.htmhttp://www.innerexplorations.com/catew/gz3.htm