4.0 out of 5 stars
A useful work, but upside-down in at least one way., Sep 5 2002
By A Customer
This review is from: The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Paperback)
I enjoyed this work. In particular, Wippel's discussion of the three meanings of participation as found in Thomas' "Commentary on the Hebdomads of Boethius" is something which is not brought out often enough in discussions of metaphysics.
I was, however, somewhat perplexed by Wippel's insistence on delaying so long the question of God's existence. This would have made some sense if the demonstration of God's existence somehow depended upon the "logical" participation that all created beings have in "esse," namely the "esse commune" of creatures. But since that is not the case, and we could equally prove the existence of God from one creature rather than all creatures in common, why spend so much time avoiding the issue of God's existence? And since creatures have their "to be" (esse) only by analogy with God's, and this is most certainly an analogy of attribution, not the internal analogy of proper proportion between "esse" and "essentia" in creatures, does not the very "logical" community of creaturely "esse" depend upon the existence of God as the ground of that community? Perhaps I am risking misunderstanding by saying this, but it strikes me as a somewhat Heideggerian move, rather than a Thomistic one. It raises Heidegger's "Sein" to a philosophic preeminence rather than ground "Sein" by analogy in God's transcendance. There is the real risk that God will indeed simply become the Highest Being (ens), rather than "Ipsum Esse Subsistens." Surely, this is not Wippel's intention, but by putting this forward in such an order, he seems to adopt a doctrine of analogy at variance with Thomas'. Perhaps this order of exposition is one of the things the previous reviewer objected to. Gilson maintained a theological order of exposition beginning with God and descending to creatures, the very pattern of the Summa. Perhaps the order can be inverted in a purely philosophical mode, but not lightly so, nor without investigating and defending explicitly the repercussions for a doctrine of participation and analogy. Certainly, in any exposition real relations and communities must precede logical ones, and I do not see that one can posit a real community of beings when the Prime Analogate is missing.
To sum up then, this is a valuable book, but I have some reservations about the order of exposition.
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