What does it mean to be? As soon as we hear someone ask this question, we become suspicious. “Is this guy a pseudo-intellectual,” we wonder, “or is he trying to sell something?” But it is a legitimate question. We may ask it without the intention of signing a book deal; without being reduced to New Age babble. In this post, I hope to show that the answer to this question, far from being flighty nonsense or academic preening, is in fact subtle, intuitive and, in my opinion, truly beautiful.
To achieve this goal, I will leverage the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. Professor Briggs, with his excellent series on Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition, has already broken the ice on the subject of Aquinas; and I will use his posts as a foundation for my case here. Skeptics of Aquinas’s general framework likely will not be won over by this article. However, I’d like to invite even those critics to consider the following material, if not on logical terms, then at least on the basis of sheer aesthetic power.
As Professor Briggs has written, Aristotle saw the world in terms of “actuality” and “potentiality”. Consider: we have a glass of water that sits actually full and potentially empty. Another actual entity barges in to this scene—a stray bulldozer, perhaps, entering through the wall—, and the glass is knocked over, spilling its contents. Thus, the glass’s potential emptiness becomes actual emptiness. Very simple. Aquinas, though, was not satisfied. While he agreed that the world was divided into actuality and potentiality, he thought that something was missing: an explanation of the existence of either state.
Aristotle could not answer this question. For him, actuality was synonymous with existence. Importantly, Aristotle stated that form, when it actualized matter, created an entity–such as our glass of water. (See this earlier post by Professor Briggs for more information on forms.) Aquinas countered that we may understand a form apart from matter: we may even contemplate the forms of non-existent entities (De ente Ch. 4). Consider: in the scene above, the glass of water does not really exist. We can understand what the glass is, but this does not tell us that the glass is–that it exists. Indeed, no such glass of water does exist. So, the difference between a real glass and our concept of a glass must be that the former, quite simply, exists.
This means that existence (“that-ness”) is higher than identity (“what-ness”), and higher than any distinction between actuality and potentiality. In order for an entity to be actual or potential, it must simply be, full stop. In basic terms: existence represents the is both in the sentence “the glass is actually full” and in the sentence “the glass is potentially empty” (Summa contra Gentiles B. I, Chap. XII). Without the is, there is no identity (the glass), nor any state in which that identity finds itself. Existence is so fundamental that it has no opposite, unlike actuality and potentiality. To have existence is to be; to lack existence is to be wiped from the slate. The only opposite to existence is non-existence, which isn’t anything at all.
This raises a further question, though. If the existence of the glass is higher than its identity, then where does its existence come from? Nothing like us–entities with identities–could provide existence, since existence is prior to identity. If something with an identity caused existence, then it too would require a cause of its existence, and a vicious regress would begin. Since there is nothing higher than existence, we are left to conclude that the existence of the glass, and of everything else, comes from existence itself. What does this mean? Isn’t this nonsense? Not exactly. If there was a “being” whose identity was the same as its existence, a “being” who was nothing other than its own existence, then it would be existence itself. This might sound vaguely familiar. Aquinas sure thought so.
13. And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is his name? what shall I say unto them?
14. And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
Aquinas uses this passage (Exodus 3:13-14) to support his conclusion that “existence itself” (“he who is”, “ipsum esse subsistens“) must necessarily be God. Existence itself would be free of any restriction, lacking in all composition, unreliant on anything else; and it would therefore be infinite. Further, it would be the source of every attribute that Aquinas predicates of existence in general: truth, goodness, nobility and beauty. But existence itself would not “be beautiful”, for instance, as if its beauty was a part of it. It would be beauty itself. And that’s not all: its beauty would be identical to its goodness, which would be identical to its truth, which would be identical to its very existence. Everything that existence itself is, it is.
Nothing can be added to or subtracted from existence itself—from God. He is the absolute fullness of all being, and He would not change or gain anything by creating things other than Himself. But He did anyway. As Aquinas tells us, God gives existence—gives his own being—to the created order. Again, though: this doesn’t change Him at all. He is our being, but we are not His being. When God grants something existence, what Aquinas calls “creation” occurs, and it’s always ex nihilo. (Recall that the opposite of existence is nothing at all.) Aquinas also makes it clear that God must at all times sustain every single thing that exists. Existence does not “stick”: it cannot ever be possessed by us. Rather, it is a gift that is quite literally infinite in magnitude.
However, God, despite being immanent in every aspect of creation, is nonetheless unknowable and unlike us. In order for something other than God to exist, it must be less than existence itself: its identity must be separate from its existence. This means that nothing we know really “exists” in the same sense as God. He is so radically different from us that we may only describe him via shaky analogy. An “infinite distance”, in Aquinas’s words, separates us from him. Yet, God is present everywhere, and everything beautiful, true and so forth provides a hint at the divine beauty and truth. God, then, is both utterly immanent and infinitely transcendent. To the rancor of certain Thomists, I would describe this as a form of panentheism.
One question remains: is it possible to know this indescribable God? Although we know that He exists, and although He is in some sense all around us, is it possible for us to see Him face to face? Yes; but discursive logic won’t get us there. At best, it tells us that He exists. To see God in Himself is the domain of supra-rational, intuitive contemplation, which was called intellectus by the ancients (Ratio and Intellectus). In this life, it is only the mystics who see God directly. Perhaps such a vision was the reason why Aquinas, near the end of his life, after an unnamed experience that he described to no one, shocked Reginald of Piperno by declaring that “all that I have written seems like straw to me.”
Regular readers will be familiar with Rank Sophist, a writer from these United States. Authors who have different ontological views, and can string pairs of readable sentences together, are welcome to submit rebuttals.