Abstract

Aquinas held that the metaphysical consideration of beings as being consists in the consideration of being as created, i.e., the consideration of things in their complete reality, and the reduction of this complete reality to its complete cause. When existence displaces form as the primary sense of being, the thing’s act of existing is conceived of as ‘formal’ with respect to its essence. Consequently, the primary object of metaphysical consideration becomes the complete entity, a composite of essence and existence, and the primary sense of being becomes the subsistence of the complete entity. In Aquinas’s creationist discourse, the term supposit denotes the concept of the entitative whole or complete entity. What this concept of the supposit adds to the Aristotelian conception of the concrete individual derives from the contingency of existence in every being beyond the first being. The subject of a nature and of categorical accidents is now also conceived of as the subject of a received act of existing. Aquinas reduces the distinctions of finite entities to their possession of acts of existing that are diverse absolutely, in virtue of a ‘privation’ of the fullness of existence, just as Aristotle reduces formal contrariety to the possession or ‘privation’ of differences that are diverse absolutely. And as Plato traced the negations constitutive of formal contrariety to a correlative participation between being and otherness, Aquinas analogously traced the distinctions of finite entities to a transcendental duality between participated existence and receiving essence. The necessary participation of each of these principles of finite being in divine and infinite existence constitutes the ultimate metaphysical reduction and horizon of a creationist metaphysics.