Aquinas and Pseudo-Dionysius on God as beyond being

Some small thought on an alleged contrast

According to Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, God is ‘beyond being’ or even ‘non-being.’¹ In his first epistle, he says that God is “highly established above mind, and above essence, by the very fact of His being wholly unknown, and not being, both is super-essentially, and is known above mind.”²

With this, the Areopagite follows the Platonic, particularly the Neoplatonic, tradition. For Plotinus, for example, the One, who Proclus calls God in his Elements of Theology,³ is beyond being.⁴

While some have noted that this stands in contrast to Aquinas’s emphasis, this is not necessarily the case, as Eric Perl has shown. While Aquinas uses a different terminology than does Plotinus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius, he is in essence saying the same thing as they do.⁵ God, by not being a ‘thing’ or a ‘being’ but pure ‘to be,’ is beyond being. The difference, then, is not essential but one of terminology. Perl writes:

Aquinas’ doctrine of God as esse is thus “negative theology” in the same way as Plotinus’ doctrine of the One as beyond being: as we have seen, what Plotinus means by “beyond being” is “not one of the beings, not any member of the totality of things that are,” but rather the enabling condition for there to be such a totality; and this is exactly what Aquinas means when he argues that the cause of being to all things is nothing but being itself, not a thing that has being.⁶

Aquinas agrees that we cannot grasp God or understand Him like a created object. If being is understood as graspable, then God being incomprehensible, is beyond being.⁷ Pseudo-Dionysius can hold that God is, in some sense, while maintaining that he is beyond being, while for Aquinas, ens commune, or esse commune, is distinct from God, who is not ‘a’ being.⁸ But despite this agreement, Aquinas uses terms that make it sound like God is Being itself.⁹

Is this a disagreement, however? And is it accurate to say that Aquinas says that God is Being itself? With Perl, I hold that any disagreement here is only appearent. Aquinas is not saying that God is ens, which is the Latin equivalent of the Greek ousía, ‘being’ or ‘essence.’ He is not saying that God is ‘a being’ or that he is ‘Being itself.’ No, he say that God is esse tantum (‘simply to be’) or ipsum esse (‘to be itself’).¹⁰

The point for Aquinas, then, is not that God ‘has’ an essence but that God simply is the condition of all being, like the One is for Plotinus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius. If, for example, we look to his commentary on The Book of Causes (Liber de causis), a text originally thought to be by Aristotle but which Aquinas thought, after examination, to be a paraphrase of Proclus’s Elements of Theology,¹¹ he states:

Now the first cause according to the Platonists indeed is beyond being (Lt. supra ens), in as much as the essence of goodness and unity, which is the first cause, exceeds even separated being itself, just as was said above; but, according to the truth of the matter, the first cause is beyond being (Lt. supra ens), inasmuch as it is infinite existence itself (Lt. ipsum esse infinitum). Now being (Lt. ens) is called that which participates existence (Lt. finite participat esse) and this is proportionate to our intellect, whose object is “what it is” as is said in On the Soul, 3 (4, 429b10) which only that which has a quiddity participating existence can be grasped by our intellect; but God’s quiddity is his very existence, whence it is beyond understanding.¹²

For Aquinas, then, we can speak of God’s essence, not because he ‘has’ one but because we have to use language that we can understand. When we examine what Aquinas writes in his commentary on The Book of Causes, it is clear that for him, like Pseudo-Dionysius, God is not the same as any created ‘being.’ He is not saying that God, like beings, ‘have’ anything, let alone an ‘essence,’ but that God is simply ‘to be.’ For him, God, being pure ‘to be’ (esse), is indeed beyond being (ens). And through participation, emanating from this subsistent esse, we are beings (entia).

So yes, Aquinas differs terminologically from Plotinus, Proclus, and Pseudo-Dionysius. But what he means by ipsum esse, ‘to be itself,’ which is beyond ens, ‘being,’ is what they mean by the One.

Notes:

1. Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the metaphysics of Aquinas, new ed. (Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 65-84, esp. 76-84.

2. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Letters (Epistulae, hereafter: Ep.), I (1065A). For critical editions of the Greek text of the Areopagite, see Corpus Dionysiacum I, ed. Beate Regina Suchla (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1990) and Corpus Dionysiacum II, 2nd ed., eds. Günter Heil and Adolf Martin Ritter (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012). There are two complete translations in English, Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid, in collaboration with Paul Rorem (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1987) and The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite, 2 vols., trans. John Parker (London: James Parker and Co., 1897, 1899). If not otherwise noted, I use Parker’s translation, though if I find it necessary, I will alter the translation. For why, see Kjetil Kringlebotten, Liturgy, Theurgy, and Active Participation: On Theurgic Participation in God, PhD dissertation (Durham University, 2021), 4, n2.

3. Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 2nd ed., reprint, Greek and English, ed., trans., intro., and comm., E.R. Dodds (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), props. 7-13, 113, 116.

4. Plotinus, Enneads, ed., Lloyd P. Gerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5.5.6. For the Greek, as well as an older translation, see Plotinus, Enneads, trans., A. H. Armstrong, in Loeb Classical Library, ed. Jeffrey Henderson, vol. 443 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

5. Eric D. Perl, “Esse Tantum and the One” (Quaestiones Disputatae, 2:1-2, 2011), 185-200; Eric D. Perl, “Into the Dark: How (Not) to Ask “Why Is There Anything at All?”,” in Mystery and Intelligibility: History of Philosophy as Pursuit of Wisdom, ed., Jeffrey Dirk Wilson (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2021), 179-206.

6. Perl, “Esse Tantum and the One,” 191.

7. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (hereafter: ST), I, q.12, a.1, ad 3; q.13, a.5, cf. Wayne J. Hankey, Aquinas’s Neoplatonism in the Summa Theologiae on God: A Short Introduction (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2019), 16; Wayne J. Hankey, God In Himself: Aquinas’ Doctrine of God as Expounded in the Summa Theologiae, reprint ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44, n30, 86-87. For Aquinas’s works, see Opera Omnia of St. Thomas Aquinas (Lander, WY: The Aquinas Institute for the Study of Sacred Doctrine, 2012-), available from the publisher’s own website.

8. Laurence Paul Hemming, “Nihilism: Heidegger and the grounds of redemption,” in Radical Orthodoxy: A new theology, eds., John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 91-108, at 94-95, esp. n17.

9. Hankey, Aquinas’s Neoplatonism, 88-117; Hankey, God In Himself; Simon Oliver, Creation: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2017), 43-53; O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the metaphysics of Aquinas, 56-58, 85-113.

10. Aquinas, On Being and Essence (De ente et essentia, hereafter: De ente), IV, 6; ST I, q.44, a.1, resp.

11. Christoph Helmig and Carlos Steel, “Proclus,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2021 Edition, ed., Edward N. Zalta, part 4.

12. Aquinas, Commentary on the Book of Causes (Super librum De causis expositio, hereafter: In De causis), prop. 10, 175.