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ST. THOMAS AQUINAS, ONTO-THEOLOGY, AND MARION^*(1)

Brian J. Shanley, O.P.

The Catholic University of America

Washington, D.C.

It is not surprising that the Revue thomiste would produce a collection of papers defending Thomas Aquinas from the Heideggerian indictment of Western metaphysics as onto-theology. What is surprising, however, is that the most significant vindication in the collection is authored by none other than Jean-Luc Marion. The reason for the surprise is, of course, that Marion's earlier and influential Dieu sans l'être (1982) had contained a damning indictment of Aquinas as the principal progenitor of onto-theology. There Marion had argued that by reversing the Pseudo-Dionysian priority of the good over being in his doctrine of the divine names, Aquinas had moved fatally away from the God of revelation and faith, who is fundamentally Love, towards the construction of the metaphysical idol of "God" who would come to dominate modern thought. Marion's original verdict on Aquinas was that he was not significantly different from Avicenna and John Duns Scotus insofar as he accorded primacy to a human concept of being (allegedly tainted with the representational limitations of the imagination) as the horizon that dominates and determines the way in which God can appear; moreover, this conceptual priority could only be univocal and so the alleged Thomistic analogy of being collapses. God is thus objectified and subordinated to human conceptualization, the beginning of the development that would flower into modern onto-theology.

Subsequent dialogue with French Thomists, however, led Marion to modify his assessment of Aquinas. In the 1991 "Preface to the English Edition" of God without Being, Marion held out the possibility that Thomistic esse may not be the being from which God needs to liberated, identifying the latter instead with both the conceptually univocal being of modern metaphysics and Heidegger's Ereignis. Marion suggested that Thomas does not chain God to metaphysics because the esse divine maintains a transcendent distance from the composed (esse-essentia) order of beings that is the subject matter of metaphysics (ens commune). Indeed, that distance is so great that there is "hardly" any analogy. Hence Thomas can be considered to be a proponent of God without being when the latter is understood in the sense of ens commune. Marion noted at the time that his arguments were only sketchy, however, and many critical questions remained regarding his interpretation of Thomas on such subjects as the nature of metaphysics, the transcendence of the divine esse, the analogy of being, and divine causality. The 1991 arguments are filled out and advanced in this volume's central piece: "Saint Thomas d'Aquin et l'onto-théo-logy." The great significance of this article, which provides the focus for the following review discussion, is that it is a clearly acknowledged retractatio by Marion of his earlier criticism of Aquinas. Whether or not it should be accepted as a genuine vindication of Aquinas, however, is not so clear.

Discussion of onto-theology is often muddled by obscurity surrounding the meaning of the term. It therefore comes as something of a relief to find Marion beginning with a clear articulation of the Heideggerian sense of metaphysics as onto-theology in terms of three essential notes. First, God must be conceived as a part of the subject matter of metaphysics, arrived at through an analysis of the particular historical determinations of the Being of beings and grasped through a univocal concept. Second, God must be the efficient causal foundation (Begründung) of beings as their sufficient reason. Third, God as ground must be causa sui, supremely grounding precisely because self-grounded. Marion's subsequent vindication of St. Thomas amounts to showing that his treatment of God does not embody any of the three constitutive characteristics of onto-theology.

First, Marion shows that Aquinas does not include God within the science of metaphysics. For St. Thomas, the proper subject of metaphysics is ens commune. God enters metaphysics' consideration only indirectly, as the principle of ens commune. Marion argues that Aquinas's clear separation of God from metaphysics' proper consideration of being is a kind of decisive preemptive strike against the subsequent scholastic tradition's tendency to bring God back within the bounds of metaphysics and its concept of being; Marion describes that tradition as having received its foundations in Scotus and its most influential modern formulation in Suarez. Marion emphasizes that Aquinas needs to be encountered on his own terms and so liberated from the prejudiced view that sees him merely as the head of the grand onto-theological metaphysical tradition. It is plain that this emphasis is born of Marion's realization that his earlier account of Aquinas was skewed by his failure in just that regard. The distance between Dieu sans l'être and this work can be measured by Marion's greater familiarity with the texts of Aquinas, his careful reading of some of the standard secondary works on Aquinas's metaphysics, and his increased historical knowledge of the subsequent scholastic tradition. Marion has done his homework.

The development in Marion's interpretation can be measured best by his treatment of analogy. Having once impugned the so-called analogy of being, Marion now argues that it is a central reason why Aquinas's position escapes the charge of onto-theology. Marion retracts his earlier charge that ens as primum conceptum commits Aquinas to an Avicennian-Scotistic univocity of being. Rather, by strictly separating esse divine from esse commune, and marking the distance by the contrast between divine simplicity as the identity of esse and essentia and created composition as the limitation of esse by a distinct essentia, Aquinas secures a transcendence of God from the being of metaphysics that rules out any univocal sense of being. This means that there can be no conceptual reciprocity between God and created beings. What relationship there is between God and other beings is an analogical one wherein the proportio that allows for a kind of unity is grounded not in a set of relationships to a common concept (as in the Cajetanian view), but rather by a focal reference to a really existing primary term that both transcends and grounds the other analogates. Analogy is a clear case where secondary reading, in the form of Montagnes's classic La doctrine de l'analogie de l'être, has improved Marion's understanding. Marion is now able to appreciate Aquinas's own view of analogy as distinct from the subsequent Scotistic-influenced Thomistic tradition.

If analogy is crucial to Aquinas's escape from the first requirement of onto-theology, it seems to come at the price of confirming the second: reducing God to ground qua efficient cause/sufficient reason. Yet Marion argues that the causal framework of participation that grounds the analogy of being does not reduce Aquinas's God to a modern onto-theological Begründung because Aquinas's understanding of divine causality is normed by creation. The causality of God as Creator is not reducible to mere efficiency and productivity along the lines of the Cartesian totalis et efficiens causa. Although Aquinas privileges efficiency, he has a more pluriform and analogous notion of divine creative causality such that it includes formal and final causality and bears no resemblance to mundane making. As causa essendi, divine causality exceeds what we can know from its created effects and analogues insofar as the latter remain within the horizon of ens/esse commune. One of Marion's most penetrating insights is that creation is the key to keeping the distance between God and being. Creation implies a unique and transcendent kind of origination that is not locatable within some larger conceptual framework provided by all-encompassing univocal notions of being or causality as in subsequent onto-theological schemas. Given this notion of creative causality, it is clear that Aquinas's God also escapes the third onto-theological requirement of being causa sui. It is well known that Aquinas thinks that self-causation of esse is incoherent. As the arguments for the existence of God show, causality stops before God, not with God. Marion notes that it is significant that Aquinas explicitly refuses to submit God to the ultimate metaphysical a priori of causality or sufficient reason; this refusal is another way in which Aquinas preemptively distinguishes his position from subsequent onto-theology.

Marion rightly worries, however, that such a defense of Aquinas does not go far enough. Even if Aquinas separates God from the metaphysics of ens commune, does he not still submit God to the horizon of being even while trying to distance him from being? Is not the entire project vitiated by its subordination of God to the question of being? In opposition to his earlier affirmative answer, Marion now argues that Aquinas separates God from being in a way that sharply distinguishes him both from a modern metaphysica with its conceptus univocus entis and from Heidegger's understanding of Sein or Ereignis (thus rendering otiose the many misguided attempts, some of which are chronicled in A. Dartigues's contribution, to vindicate Aquinas by claiming some kind of common ground with Heidegger). Aquinas accomplishes this by refusing to submit God even to esse as we know it. While according esse a primacy in terms of the divine names, Aquinas does not forget his own distinction between res significata, ratio nominis, and modus significandi. Our grasp of the divine qua esse is not a grasp of the divine nature, which remains a mysterium tremendum et fascinandum, since our grasp of esse is inescapably rooted in the horizon of ens commune. We do not know God because we know created esse, since God is not found within the horizon of created esse. We can gain no conceptual purchase on the nature of the utterly simple and infinite esse of God. Ultimately what esse means is determined by divinity in a way that completely surpasses our conceptual ken. Marion argues that Thomas's exegesis of Exodus 3:14 confirms this reading. While Qui est is maxime proprium nomen Dei, it remains only a name. And even Qui est must give way to the Tetragrammaton as magis proprium precisely because it safeguards the singular incommunicability of God.

Marion's basic position is that Thomas's metaphysics escapes onto-theology because it culminates in apophatism. His most controversial claim in this regard is that Aquinas's esse divine should be understood in an exclusively negative sense. Thomistic esse should not even be considered within the horizon of traditional metaphysics, but rather taken in a meta-ontological sense. Marion acknowledges that there are numerous texts where Aquinas does identify God with being as primum ens, but that these passages need to be read in the light of Aquinas's larger aim which is to distance God from the being of metaphysics. Marion therefore concludes by arguing that Thomas's apophatic teaching regarding the divine esse makes "God without Being" a thoroughly Thomistic doctrine. Gary Prouvoust echoes this strategy in another contribution and argues that "God without Being" should be accepted by Thomists so long as the negation is understood by way of eminence rather than privation and no other name is substituted.

Marion anticipates that some Thomists will object to his latest reading of Aquinas as no more than a covert recapitulation of his strategy in Dieu sans l'être of subordinating esse to some other cause along the lines of Pseudo-Dionysius. Marion himself acknowledges that such worries are not without some foundation, since his work goes against more traditional readings of Aquinas and is marked by his own limitations of knowledge. Yet even if one cannot go all the way down the path that Marion has marked out, as I cannot, there is no doubt that this is a genuine retractatio and that it points out some novel and persuasive lines of vindication for Aquinas. There is no covert Dionysianism here; Marion is not interested in subordinating esse to bonum. Nor is there covert Heideggerianism here; Marion wants a God without Sein or Ereignis as well as without onto- theological being. Marion does want to make a Heideggerian end-run around a corrupt metaphysical tradition, but now the latter is more properly interpreted to be the one beginning with Scotus and running through Suarez to Wolff and beyond. If there is something post-modern about Marion's reading of Aquinas, there is also something traditional. Marion's emphasis on the apophatic side of Aquinas involves a conscious attempt to link himself with the kind of Thomism represented most significantly in the twentieth century by A.-D. Sertillanges (see n. 81 on p. 62) and there is some textual warrant for such an interpretation. Marion seems to go beyond even Sertillanges's position, however, in his exclusive emphasis on the via negativa at the expense of the via causalitatis and the via eminentiae. While Marion is right to argue that the apophatic side of Aquinas needs to be retrieved in the light of the Heideggerian critique, he ultimately pushes that interpretation too far. Marion's reading simply cannot be reconciled with Aquinas's position that certain terms can be predicated of God positively and substantially (though non-quidditatively) through analogy. At the risk of oversimplification, it seems that once again analogy is at the root of Marion's misunderstanding of Aquinas. For all of his progress on analogy, Marion still seems somewhat under the spell of Scotus insofar as he continues to construe analogy as an account of how formal concepts can apply to God rather than as an account of the lived use of language in religious affirmations. It is to be hoped that further reading of secondary sources will help Marion to see that Aquinas's confidence in the possibility of positive analogical predication is rooted not in the belief that God can somehow be captured by the concepts involved, but rather in the belief that such judgments really do point us dynamically in the right direction toward the abiding mystery of God.

Thomists who find Marion's position extreme might prefer the more conventional responses to onto-theology outlined by T.-D. Humbrecht and Michel Bastit. Humbrecht considers the question whether or not God has an essence and argues that to interpret Aquinas's identification of esse and essentia in God as tantamount to a denial that God has an essence fails to escape from onto-theology because it remains within the grip of the very essentialism that needs to be surmounted. Rather, it is central to Aquinas that both essentia and esse be attributed to God. Humbrecht argues that it is the identity of esse and essentia ingredient in Aquinas's doctrine of divine simplicity that secures divine transcendence; the distance that Marion wants between God and being is safeguarded by situating God not beyond being, but rather beyond composed being. In a similar vein, Bastit argues against a Platonic detachment of God from being on the grounds that it implies indeterminacy and potentiality in God. It is rather the case that Aquinas secures God's transcendence by identifying the divine being, understood in terms of both esse and essentia, with the plenitude of self-determining actuality conceived ultimately (following the lead of John of St. Thomas) in terms of God's act of auto-intellection. While there is much that is insightful in Humbrecht's and Bastit's replies to the onto-theological challenge, they are likely to be persuasive only to those already committed to Aquinas. This group should welcome Marion's work as a more effective instrument for convincing those who have already dismissed Aquinas.

A common assumption of all the contributors to this volume is that onto-theology has its origins in metaphysical developments after Aquinas. Articulating this new historical narrative is a vital part of any vindication of Aquinas. Olivier Boulnois, a specialist in Scotus, devotes his contribution to determining the premodern origins of onto-theology. He lays the blame squarely at Scotus's door. By articulating a univocal conception of being prior in intelligibility to God, Scotus anticipates the modern objectification of being and the distinction between metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis. The subsequent historical development of onto-theology includes many Thomists who betrayed their master's position by compromising the analogy of being in the face of Scotism. As many note, the most significant figure in this regard is Suarez; unfortunately, however, there is no extended treatment of Suarez in this collection (instead we are constantly referred to J.-F. Courtine's Suarez et le système de la métaphysique [Paris, 1990]). Serge Bonino provides an extended consideration of the way in which Capreolus succumbed to Scotus by holding for a univocal concept of being that applies to both God and creatures while simultaneously trying to maintain his fidelity to St. Thomas by holding that being itself is analogical. This pull of opposing noetic and metaphysical forces plagues Thomism after Scotus. As Bonino shows, a univocal conception of being leads away from the apophatic path advocated by Marion and towards a more Scotistic claim that we can have a proper, though non-defining, knowledge of God wherein being provides the central note. Bonino shows that Capreolus's claims about the possibility of proper, positive, albeit imperfect, knowledge of God are squarely within the Thomistic mainstream and a defensible reading of Aquinas. Bonino is certainly right about the historical claims; however, Marion's analysis indicates that a more apophatic approach to Aquinas ought to be preferred.

This collection would be valuable even without Marion's piece. It must ultimately be acknowledged, however, that it is Marion's retractatio that gives this volume its real import. Doubtless some Thomists will greet Marion's retractatio with a shake of the head and be tempted to believe that he is saying something that they had known all along. Yet it should be evident by now that Marion's work is not a simple corroboration of traditional positions, but a powerful re-reading and retrieval of Aquinas within the context of an important contemporary problematic. If his reading proves provocative and disturbing to some Thomists, they should find consolation in the fact that it will prove equally or even more disturbing to those who have hitherto been able to rely on Dieu sans l'être as an authoritative demonstration of the irrelevance of Aquinas to the postmodern problematic. Marion's repudiation of his earlier distorted reading means that facile criticism of Aquinas as an onto-theologian no longer has any fashionable intellectual cover. The claim that the recovery of God without onto-theological being necessarily requires a repudiation of Aquinas must now be argued for rather than presumed. And the most influential intellectual foe to be overcome in that attempt is henceforth Marion himself.

While it would be premature to push this line very far, it nevertheless seems possible that Marion may turn out to be something like Alasdair MacIntyre: an established philosopher trained outside the Thomistic tradition, initially critical of Thomas, who eventually finds his way to embracing Thomas in provocative and innovative ways. If this is the case, then Marion will likewise find himself criticized on both sides as neither fish nor foul; postmodern types will lament that he has gone soft, while Thomists will lament that he is not yet traditional enough. He may never satisfy either side, but they both will have to read him. And they both can learn from him.

1. Saint Thomas et l'onto theologie. Actes du colloque tenu a l'Institut catholique de Toulouse les 3 et 4 juin 1994. A special edition of the Revue thomiste, 95, no. 1 (January-March 1995): 192.