Author: Sebastian Mahfood

It would seem that metaphysics would have to be either an ontology or a theology, but that it could not be both. An ontology is that which has everything as its subject matter, which properly studies being as being. A theology, on the other hand, is that which has God as its subject matter, which properly studies God. When Werner Jaeger wrote his dissertation on Aristotle’s Metaphysics and published it in 1912, he argued that Aristotle’s work lacks cohesion in its inability to address whether the field of metaphysics was based on ontology or on theology. His work produced a colossal reaction for half a century as scholars made their careers on exploring the possibilities of this disunity, a problem that would bring into question every pre-1912 commentator on Aristotle, most notable of whom was St. Thomas Aquinas. This was not a problem for Thomas, though, who framed a simple solution – in order for metaphysics to be a theology, that is, a divine science, it has to first be an ontology, a science that explores the nature of being as emanating from God.

If Thomas begins his commentary on the Metaphysics by reconciling the term with the sciences of ontology and theology, then Jaeger should have taken heed while preparing his dissertation for defense. His advisors at the Humboldt University in Berlin should especially have taken heed of Thomas’s work and simply advised Jaeger that he did not have a strong point to his argument. The reason that they did not do so and that Jaeger felt he had a viable argument in the first place likely had to do with his method of textual criticism. In working through the Metaphysics, he noticed that there appeared to be incongruities in thought – that sometimes it would seem that the work was espousing a Platonist frame of mind and that at other times it was espousing something much more closely related to what we know as Aristotelian thought. While his observation, if at all valid, could be explained by Aristotle’s having been a part of Plato’s Academy for twenty years before branching out to form his peripatetic school, and that such differences in the text might merely reflect a growing maturity in the thought of Aristotle, Jaeger noticed that these differences were woven into the fabric of the Metaphysics in such as way as to resemble a patchwork document that not only lacked unity of purpose but also coherence in articulation. As McInerny writes in his preface to “The Love of Wisdom,” “For Jaeger, in the Metaphysics there is a Platonic Layer, there are Aristotelian layers, but what there is not is literary unity” (Aquinas 718). This observation gave credence to Jaeger’s idea that there were warring positions within the text that earlier commentators simply glossed over in their attempts to explain the work.

If it were possible to bring into question all commentary on Aristotle before 1912, then Jaeger’s hypothesis would be a tool to demonstrate the madness of people like Averroës, whom Thomas corrects, and even of Thomas himself. If this were true, furthermore, as McInerny describes Jaeger’s line of thought, “Aristotle’s inability to reconcile these views makes [not only his but also all his commentators] effort a tragic failure” (Aquinas 718), bringing into question even their sanity (McInerny, Audio CD, 1.2). What is a problem for Jaeger, however, is simply not a problem for Aristotle or for Thomas. McInerny posits that “the option [Jaeger] sees Aristotle vacillating before could not possibly be an option for Aristotle. In order for Jaeger’s dilemma to make sense, it would have to make sense that there could be a science whose subject matter is separate or divine being. But no human science could have such a subject” (“Lesson 2: The Genetic Aristotle”).  What human science can engage, however, and which is the ultimate aim of metaphysics, “is such knowledge of God as the human mind can acquire” (“Lesson 12, The Names of God”). While the human mind cannot directly penetrate the mind of God, it is natural for us to want to try to understand that which we can about our creator, and the only real way to do that is to study being in general.  As Thomas writes in his preface to the Metaphysics,

although the subject of this science is being in general, the whole of it is predicated of those things which are separate from matter both in their intelligible constitution and in being (esse). For it is not only those things which can never exist in matter which are said to be separate from matter in their intelligible constitution and in being, such as God and the intellectual substances, but also those things which can exist without matter, such as being in general. (2)

For this reason, Thomas concludes, the science can be called a divine science or theology in that its subject is God, a metaphysics in that it considers being as being, and first philosophy in that it considers the first causes of things. Both Aristotle and Thomas presuppose an objection like Jaeger’s, moreover, as McInerny explains, “[Metaphysics] is a general science — and then it cannot have a particular subject matter — but it is also the science of the separable and immobile, that is, the divine. Moreover, Aristotle says it is the one because it is the other –because it is first in the sense of dealing with the first kind of being, separable being, it also deals with being as being and its properties” (“Lesson 2: The Genetic Aristotle”). It makes sense, then, that Thomas saw no incongruity here and even demonstrates the cohesion within the purpose and goals of the science, and McInerny is right to point out that Jaeger simply got it wrong.

If it is true that Jaeger has no case, then all that is left to do is shift from defending the unity of the work and its unity of purpose to explaining what is meant by the thesis that metaphysics in order to be a theology has to also be an ontology. From Book 1, Lesson 3, we can derive the purpose that Aristotle gives the science. He writes, foremost, that a science like this cannot be practical but speculative. “For of all knowledge that which God most properly has is divine; and if there is any such knowledge, it is concerned with divine matters. But this science alone has both of these characteristics; for God seems to be a cause and in some sense a principle according to all men; and such [knowledge as this] God either alone has, or has in the highest degree” (22).  For humankind to study this science is for it to engage in the systematic and focused study of the mind of God, the origin and summation of all things, and that is what makes it a theology.  This science must also, however, be an ontology since a principle cause of all things would be the starting point of all being, and being has to be studied qua being. 

That generation of forms into being would be part of the nature of God, the study of metaphysics, of first principles, would necessarily be a study of the division of form and substance, and this would trickle down to the smallest creature.  In Book 3, Lesson 3, in fact, Aristotle points out that “the most difficult question of all, and the most disputed one, is whether unity and being are not something different from the substances of existing things, as the Pythagoreans and Plato say” (Aquinas, “Commentary,” 147).  The subject of metaphysics is substance itself as Aristotle writes in the Metaphysics: “If there is no substance other than those which are formed by nature, natural science will be the first science; but if there is an immovable substance, the science of this must be prior and must be first philosophy, and universal in this way, because it is first. And it will belong to this to consider being qua being-both what it is and the attributes which belong to it qua being” (Book VI, Part 1). Substance, which is composed of matter and form, is a thing that is independent of other things around it that change in a dramatic way – that come into being and pass out of being (McInerny, Audio CD, 5.1).  This creates a primacy of substance, and if “[b]eing in the primary sense is substance . . . a science of being can effectively become a science of substance” (“Lesson Eleven: The Analogy of Being”). Aristotle spends a great deal of time on substance because any effort to talk about the metaphysical is going to be grounded in the physical, within the philosophy of nature (McInerny, Audio CD, 5.1). This study of the nature of the creator, then, must also be a study of the nature of the created, who, as Aristotle points out, comes to know the physical world first and foremost through the senses, which are not regarded in themselves as wisdom because they focus on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘why.’

Metaphysics, consequently, differs from natural science and mathematics in that it is a divine science, a study of causation, rather than a study of effects. “Wisdom,” Aristotle argues from the onset, “is knowledge about certain principles and causes” (Book 1, Part 1), and the very fact that Aristotle is engaged in this pursuit sets him apart from his former teacher who had Socrates argue in the “Phaedrus” that a study of this sort is ultimately unattainable because the realm of wisdom, which is beyond the grasp of man, can belong only to the gods. Aristotle’s idea that the first principles and causes are “most knowable; for by reason of these, and from these, all other things come to be known, and not these by means of the things subordinate to them” (Book 1, Part 2) affirms humanity’s special relationship to God as created in his likeness and image. To understand first causes, then, we have to first come to the conclusion that there is something about the effects we perceive in the natural world that give us a sense that there is something to know beyond the natural world. What we are really trying to do in Aristotle’s worldview is get our minds around the mind of God with the idea that it is natural for us to want to do so. That we do not see this in Plato’s philosophy, and that it is such a primary motive throughout Aristotle’s, is, in and of itself, a refutation of Jaeger.

Thomas, in his Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle, furthermore, provides three reasons for our natural predisposition for this kind of study.  First, “each thing naturally desires its own perfection . . . since the intellect, by which man is what he is, . . . is none of the things that exist before it understands them, . . . so each man naturally desires knowledge just as matter desires form.” Secondly, “each thing has a natural inclination to perform its proper operation . . . the proper operation of man as man is to understand.” Finally, “it is desirable for each thing to be united to its source, since it is in this that the perfection of each thing consists.” This part of our nature, then, that seeks to be united to its source is an articulation of our spirituality as Pope John Paul II has taught us through Fides et Ratio (1998) where he writes, “it is metaphysics which makes it possible to ground the concept of personal dignity in virtue of [our] spiritual nature” (para. 83).  Without metaphysics, he continues, we would not be able to begin theological studies as “[t]he word of God refers constantly to things which transcend human experience and even human thought; but this ‘mystery’ could not be revealed, nor could theology render it in some way intelligible, were human knowledge limited strictly to the world of sense experience” (para. 83).  For God to reveal himself to man, then, he had to give us the capacity for revelation, and that capacity is knowable within the study of metaphysics.

Bibliography

Aquinas, Thomas. Commentary on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. Vol. 1. Trans. by John P. Rowan. Chicago: Henry Regnery Compnay, 1961.

Aquinas, Thomas. “The Love of Wisdom. Exposition of Metaphysics, Preface and I, I-3 (1271).” Thomas Aquinas: Selected Writings. Ed. And Trans. By Ralph McInerny. New York: Penguin Books, 718-43.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. The Internet Classics Archive. Trans. by W. D. Ross. Online at 20 September 2006. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html

John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio. (1998.) Online (20 September 2006) § 83. http://www.vatican.va/edocs/ENG0216/__PG.HTM

McInerny, Ralph. “Lesson X: Title.” Metaphysics. Online 5 December, 2006. http://home.comcast.net/~icuweb/c01908.htm

McInerny, Ralph. Metaphysics. Audio CD. Catholic Educational Television, Inc., 2005.