W. Norris Clarke. Person, Being, and St. Thomas. Communio 19 ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

606 W. Norris Clarke , I Person, being, and St. Thomas 607 others, is St. Thomas's way of integrating into his own metaphysics of being the rich Platonic and Neoplatonic traditions of being, as the medieval adage has it, although the interpretathe self-diffusiveness of the Good (understood by them as more tion varied according to the meaning given to esse). To know ultimate than being, which always meant limited intelligible another being, therefore, is to know it as this kind of actor. essence). Existence itself (esse) now becomes for Thomas the The innate dynamism of being as overflowing into ultimate root of all perfection, with unity and goodness its self-manifesting, self-communicating action, is clear and extranscendental properties or attributes, facets of the inexhaust- plicit in St. Thomas. What is clearly implied, however, though, ible richness of being itself. And once the Platonic realism of not as explicit, is the corollary that relationality is a primordial divine ideas is overcome, Thomas's Supreme Being, the pure dimension of every real being, inseparable from its substantisubsistent Act of Existence, can become identically Intelligence ality, just as action is from existence. For if a being naturally flows over into self-communicating action to and on others, it and Will, and the intrinsic self-diffusiveness of the Good turns into Love, self-communicative Love. The ultimate reason now immediately generates a network of relations with all its recipappears why all beings, by the very fact that they are, possess ients. Action, passion, and relations are inseparably tied tothis natural dynamism toward action and self-communication: gether even in the Aristotelian categories. While all relations they are all diverse modes of participation in the infinite good- are not generated by action, still all action and passion necessarily generate relations. ness of the one Source, whose very being is identically self- It tuns out, then, that relationality and substanticommunicative Love. Dante, good Thomist that he was, was ality go together as two distinct but inseparable modes of realright after all when he summed it up in the Paradiso: "Love ity. Substance is the primary mode, in that all else, including makes the world go round." relations, depend on it as their ground. But since "every sub- This understanding of being as intrinsically active, stance exists for the sake of its operations," as St. Thomas has self-manifesting and self-communicating through action, I con- just told us, being as substance, as existing in itself, naturally sider not merely as a position of historical interest for appreci- flows over into being as relational, turned towards others by its ating ancient and medieval thought, but also in its own right as self-communicating action. To be is to be substance-in-relation.14 one of the few great fundamental insights in the history of In a creature it may well be accidental which particmetaphysics, without which no viable metaphysical vision can ular other being it will be related to here and now. But being get far off the ground. For consider what would happen if one related in some way to the world around it, as well as to its attempted to deny that every real being is active, self-mani- various sources, will flow from its very nature both as an exfesting through action. Suppose a being that really exists, but istent being and as material. Within the divine being, the reladoes not act in any way, does not manifest itself in any way to tions of procession between the three Persons are not accidenother beings. There would be no way for anything else to know tal but constitutive of the very nature of the divine substance. that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of Substantiality and relationality are here equally primordial and reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all-it necessary dimensions of being itself at its highest intensity. would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being. If many or And the ultimate reason why all lower beings manifest this all real beings were this way, each would be locked off in total relationality as well as substantiality is that they are all in some isolation from every other. There would not be a connected way images of God, their ultimate Source, the supreme synuniverse (its root, universum, means in fact "turned toward thesis of both. Therefore, all being is, by its very nature as unity"). The only way that beings can connect up with each being, dyadic, with an "introverted," or in-itself dimension, as other to form a unified system is through action. To be and to be active, though logically distinct, are inseparable. "Communication," as Aquinas says, "follows upon the very intelligibility of actuality." The full meaning of "to be" is not just "to be present," but "to be actively present." Existence is power-full, 141 have developed this formula at length in my article, "To Be is To Be energy-filled presence. Agere sequitur esse (action follows upon Substance-in-Relation," to appear in the forthcoming festschrift , Metaphysics as Foundation: Essays in Honor of lvor Leclerc (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992).
608 W. Nowis Clarke substance, and an "extroverted," or towards-othms dimension, as relational through action. Let us conclude this section with a quotation from Josef Pieper, who, more than most contemporary Thomists, has brought out the proportional connection between the sub- stantial and relational aspects of being: To sum it up, then: to have (or to be) an "intrinsic existence" means "to be able to relate" and "to be the sustaining subject at the center of a field of reference". . . . Only in reference to an inside can there be an outside. Without a self-contained "subject" there can be no This dynamic polarity between substance and action-plus-relations was submerged and almost forgotten in the post-medieval period from Descartes on. Three major distor- tions of the classical notion of substance broke the connection: (1) the Cartesian notion of the isolated, unrelated substance, "that which needs nothing else but itself (and God) to exist"; (2) the Lockean static substance, the inert substratum needed to support accidents but unknowable in itself; and (3) the separa- ble substance of Hume, which, if it existed, would have to be empirically observable as separated from all its accidents, and hence is an impossible fiction. Because these emasculated versions of substance were the only ones familiar to them from classical modern phi- losophy, a large number of modern and contemporary thinkers have simply rejected substance entirely as a nonviable mode of being, e.g., Bergson, Collingwood, Whitehead, Dewey, Heideg- ger, most phenomenologists, and many others. As a result, the person tended to be reduced to nothing but a relation or set of relations. The difficulty, here, however, as Pieper warned, is that if the substance, or in-itself, pole of being is dropped out, the unique interiority and privacy of the person are wiped out 15Josef Pieper, The Truth of all Things, reprinted in the Living the Truth (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989), 83 and 82. Person, being, and St. Thomas 609 also and the person turns out to be an entirely extroverted bundle of relations, with no inner self to share with others. But there is no need for this eitherlor dichotomy between substance and relation, once the notion of substance as center of activ- ity--and receptivity-has been retieved. To be is to be substance-in-relation. Application to the person For St. Thomas, personality in the ontological sense, i.e., to be a person, is rooted in the act of existing: to be o be an intellectual nature possessing its own ue act of existing so as to be the autonomous source of its actions. Thus, in the theological application of the doc- re of Christ is complete as a nature, but t of existing, so it is not a human person, rsonal act of existence of the Second ow the person, for Aquinas, "is that all of nature." But since the act of t of all perfection, it follows that to be ed on to being from without, but n of being, itself, being come into its , allowed to be fully what it tends to be by estricted by the limitation proper to the ma- g, with self-dispersal over space that is char- In a word, when being is allowed to be fully ecessarily turns into luminous self- r self-consciousness-one of the of person. To be fully is to be personally. All this is clear enough in Aquinas himself. But ation follows from this rooting of at its supra-material levels-an ght out explicitly, or at least was by him. Being is not just presence, ture to pour over into active unication to others. And if ally being itself only at its supra-material that to be a person as such is to be a being nature to pour over into active, conscious self- and self-communication to others, through intel- together. And if the person in question is htly ordered in its conscious free action, ce to others will take the form of willing
Page 1 and 2: 600 Roch Kereszty The second functi
Page 3: u4 W. Norris Clarke It follows upon
Page 7 and 8: I 612 W. Norris Clarke Person, bein
Page 9 and 10: 616 W. Norris Clarke . Person, bein

W. Norris Clarke. Person, Being, and St. Thomas. Communio 19 ...

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?