Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, Bernard J.F., The Trinune God: Systematics

Titel: Substanz - Kategorie

Index: Substanz als Kategorie ist nicht identisch mit der 1. oder 2. Substanz

Kurzinhalt: Substance that is the first predicament does not mean the same as substance defined as that to which it is proper to be per se. For predicamental substance is divided into first (this man, this ox) and second (man, ox). Now ...

Text: [h] Substance that is the first predicament does not mean the same as substance defined as that to which it is proper to be per se. For predicamental substance is divided into first (this man, this ox) and second (man, ox). Now it does not at all belong to second substance to be per se; for second substance is a universal, and it does not belong to a universal to be per se but only in another, that is, in the mind. Nor does it belong only to first substance to be per se; for first substance is a supposit, which already is per se, and it belongs to a substantial individual essence, which is not a supposit, to be per se. (Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Thomas, Aquin von, Anmerkung zu Band 06 der Deutschen Thomas-Ausgabe

Titel: Substanz - Einteilung

Index: Substanz: vollständig, unvollständig (als Art oder S:), Vollsubstanz, Teilsubstanz; Vollselbständiges; Person, Natur; Grundsatz: Tätigkeiten - vollselbständige S.

Kurzinhalt: Daher ist das Vollselbständige das, was ist; die Natur ist das, wodurch es dieses Artbestimmte ist. Das Vollselbständige als das, was ist, ist auch das, was tätig ist; die Natur ist das, wodurch es tätig ist. Daher der Grundsatz: die Tätigkeiten ...

Text: [16] Zu S. 18.

16a Die Substanz wird bestimmt als ein Seiendes, dem es zukommt, an und für sich zu sein und nicht an einem andern. Von ihr verschieden ist das Akzidens als ein Seiendes, dem es zukommt, nicht an und für sich zu sein, sondern an einem andern. Die Substanz fassen wir auf 1. als den Träger der Akzidentien, dem diese anhaften, 2. als an und für sich seiend, sich selbst tragend, im Gegensatz zum Sein an einem andern, zum Anhaften nach Art der Akzidentien. (Fs)

16b Die Substanz wird eingeteilt in die vollständige und die unvollständige Substanz. Die unvollständige Substanz wird weiter eingeteilt in eine solche, die nur als Art unvollständig ist (incompleta in ratione speciei tantum): die menschliche Seele, und eine solche, die auch als Substanz, als Grund des Fürsichseins unvollständig ist (incompleta in ratione speciei et substantialitatis): der erste Stoff und jede andere in den Stoff aufgenommene substantielle Form. Vollkommen ist der Substanzbegriff verwirklicht nur in der vollständigen Substanz, die ein eigenständiges Vollwesen ist. Daher ist schon die menschliche Seele, obwohl nur unvollständig als Art, nicht vollkommen Substanz, weil sie eine unvollständige Wesenheit ist. Sie enthält aber noch das eigentliche Wesen des Substanzseins in sich, weil sie, auch vom Körper getrennt, die geistigen Akzidentien (Verstand und Willen) trägt und für sich ist. In der Substanz jedoch, die auch als Substanz unvollständig ist, bewahrheitet sich das eigentliche Wesen des Substanzseins nicht mehr, weil sie nicht fähig ist, weder Akzidentien, noch sich gelbst zu tragen. Denn der tragende Untergrund der körperlichen Akzidentien ist nicht der Stoff oder die Form, sondern nur das aus Stoff und Form zusammengesetzte Ganze; sie sind auch nicht fähig, für sich zu sein, sondern nur das Ganze. (Fs) (notabene)

16c Eine weitere Einteilung der Substanz ist die in eine selbständige und eine unselbständige Substanz. Selbständigkeit bedeutet für die Substanz Unabhängigkeit im Dasein sowohl von einem Träger, dem sie (wie das Akzidens) anhaften würde, als auch von jedem anderen substantiellen Wesen, mit dem sie das Dasein in der Weise gemeinsam hätte, daß sie dasselbe nicht für sich allein besäße. Die Substanzen, die unvollständig sind als Substanzen, wie der erste Stoff und alle Formen außer der Menschenseele, sind auch unselbständig. Wenn sie auch nicht wie die Akzidentien einem Träger anhaften, so können sie doch nur mit einer anderen Teilsubstanz Dasein haben. Die selbständige Substanz ist also eine solche, die ihr Sein weder an einem andern, noch mit einem andern gemeinsam, sondern für sich allein hat. Die selbständige Substanz ist unvollkommen selbständig, wenn sie zwar ihr Sein für sich allein hat, ihrer Natur nach aber dennoch darauf hingeordnet ist, mit einem andern ihr Sein zu haben. Dies ist der Fall bei der Substanz, die unvollständig ist als Art, vollständig aber als Substanz: bei der menschlichen Seele. Denn die vom Körper getrennte menschliche Seele hat ihr Sein für sich allein, jedoch so, daß sie ihrer Natur nach eine dem Stoff mitteilbare Form ist und mitgeteilt das Sein gemeinsam mit dem Stoff hat. Jener Substanz jedoch, die auch als Art vollständig ist, kommt es zu, Vollselbständiges (Hypostase, suppositum) zu sein. Das Vollselbständige ist schlechthin in jeder Weise unmitteilbar und in der Ordnung des Fürsichseins ganz vollkommen, d. h. es ist unmitteilbar für sich seiende Einzelsubstanz. Das Vollselbständige, das eine vernünftige Natur hat, wird Person genannt. Das Vollselbständige verhält sich zum Wesen, zur Natur, wie das Ganze zu seinem bestimmtheitlichen (formalen) Teil. Daher ist das Vollselbständige das, was ist; die Natur ist das, wodurch es dieses Artbestimmte ist. Das Vollselbständige als das, was ist, ist auch das, was tätig ist; die Natur ist das, wodurch es tätig ist. Daher der Grundsatz: die Tätigkeiten gehören dem Vollselbständigen an (vgl. GrPh 2, 109 ff.). (Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Thomas Aquinas / Timothy Suttor, Summa Theologiae: Man 1a. 75-83

Titel: Substanz - Existenz

Index: Substanz, Subsistenz, Wortgeschichte: (1., 2. Substanz), essentia (Cicero), substantia (Seneca); Butler an Locke: Zusammenhang: Seiend - Substanz; Existenz nur im Urteil; Substanz - Akkzidenz

Kurzinhalt: Against all academic probability, St Thomas's conception of man's unity was to prevail in the Roman Church... And substance is the ground in which a bundle of accidents, when unified in a nature, has existence.

Text: SUBSTANTIALITY
(1a. 75, 2)

253a The notion of 'substance' is central in the traditional thought of Latin Christianity. 'Subsistence' is intimately connected, and neither can be understood without understanding 'essence' and 'existence'. Essentia, coined by Cicero, is the most ancient of the four terms, but like the Greek term ousia, which it was designed to translate, it was used vaguely and rhetorically. Substantia, taken from Quintilian and Seneca, was given metaphysical force: it meant the out-there-in-itself-hood of a thing. As early as we have a Latin Christian literature we find the term used in this way as part of the hard core of Christian dogma. It entered into the Nicene definition of the Incarnation, into all subsequent expositions of the doctrine of the Trinity, and finally into the understanding of the Eucharist. (Fs) (notabene)

253b Later, yet still centuries before St Thomas, thinkers began to distinguish 'essence' from 'existence' within 'substance'. 'Existence' was another Ciceronian term. 'Subsistence' was also a respectable word, found in Virgil and Caesar, but now transferred to new and metaphysical meanings. As Neoplatonism made the Aristotelean treatise on the Categories better known among the educated,1 it was used to describe what differentiates 'first substance', which cannot be predicated, from 'second substance', which can, and hence to mean what has existence in its own right, as distinct from an accident or substantial matter, which cannot as such exist alone. The exact meanings of the four terms, however, took a long time to settle down.2 The boundaries between them were still uncertain and shifting in the work of Boethius (d. 524), written about the time when Plato's Academy was being closed down.3 St Thomas finally stabilized their meanings and applied them to the problem of man's unity, a complex essence with one substantial existence, a substantial spiritual form directly informing matter. (Fs)

253c According to John Peckam, this doctrine was invented by St Thomas. Knowles4 denies this; but it is at least fair to say, with van Steenberghen,5 that his 'solution to the problem of man's nature goes beyond all the suggested solutions recorded earlier in the history of philosophy'. Pegis6 puts it almost as strongly as Peckam: 'The Thomistic conception of man is a doctrine that none of the great commentators before St Thomas had visualized as philosophically possible in Aristotelian terms.' And historians agree that this, more than any other of Thomas's innovations, provoked the hostility of the neo-Augustinians, as the Peckam-style conservatives may be called. The thesis of 1a. 76,1 challenged the entire structure of their thought: their notions of matter as imperfect actuancy, of the soul as a complete substance, 'spiritual matter', the multiplication of forms and the forma corporeitatis. And it meant that St Thomas's system superseded St Bonaventure's; though the condemnations of the decade 1277-86 have been regarded as a victory of the latter's school over St Thomas, as well as over Siger of Brabant. (Fs)

254a Against all academic probability, St Thomas's conception of man's unity was to prevail in the Roman Church. It also (partly in consequence) became a fixed feature of vernacular culture. Major assaults have left it far from prevalent, yet still readily accessible, within the main complex of the tradition. Many of the technical terms have been challenged and dropped without what they meant being lost from view. (Fs)

254b As Butler warned Locke, the words 'being' and 'substance' stand for the same idea. The only meaning we can give the word 'exist' compels us to use the word 'substance' or else some other word or periphrasis that comes to the same. Yet substance as we meet it has to be thought of in terms of accident because that is the way it exists—in terms of quality and activity in all cases, of quantity and its sequels (position, succession, arrangement, susceptibility) in the case of material things. Existence, and hence all that is per se involved with it, is not an object of sensation, and is not a concept; only in the certitude of judgment, which is a kind of self-examination before the real, does the mind know existence. And substance is the ground in which a bundle of accidents, when unified in a nature, has existence. Substantiality is that 'unitive containment' (to use a term of Scotus) these objects of thought have when thrust into the real. No images can help us much. However, where language has proved an obstacle to thought it ought to be replaced. The metaphor of sub-stance, under-lie, has caused so much trouble one wonders whether it would not be worth trying Scotus's unitive containment or White-head's organic prehension. They too, however, are metaphors, and would inevitably meet the same fate sooner or later. (Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Schindler, David C., Jun, The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: Substanz - Kausalität

Index: Kausalität 6h; Aristoteles: Ewigkeit d. Arten - Thomas: Schöpfung; Substanz: absoluter Bezugspunkt für Verständnis d. Ursachen (Beispiel: Frosch unreduzierbar auf Teile); Dilemma: Ganzheit d. S. - Möglichkeit v. Evolution

Kurzinhalt: In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes ...

Text: Substantial Meaning

153b To respond to this nihilism, we must ask what understanding of being is necessary for an integrated notion of causality. As we have seen, each of the causes has its proper meaning only in relation to the others. But this interdependence would seem to create a logical difficulty: if A cannot be A without B, but B cannot be B without A, then it would seem to be impossible to have either, for each would await the other to attain to its own meaning, which entails an infinite regress with no absolute place to start. But if it is true that one could never move sequentially from A to B, or from B to A, insofar as the two are reciprocally dependent, it is possible to have both of them at the same time, or in other words to take as the starting point the reality of a whole in which A and B are reciprocally dependent as constitutive parts. And here we are brought to the sense of being required for an integrated notion of causality: as Aristotle saw, the essential meaning of being is substance; what are absolute are concrete, natural things, the most basic of which are organisms, and the most derivative of which are in some sense elements and in another sense artifacts.1 A substance is a whole, which is simultaneously complex and irreducibly one. A substance cannot be divided, properly speaking, without ceasing to be the substance it was (homogenous elements come closest to this possibility, but for that very reason are the least deserving of the name "substance"). In it, the constitutive principles — efficiency, matter, form, and finality — interweave in a reciprocally dependent and asymmetrical manner, as we described above. They exist together in some respect "all at once." (Fs; tblStw: Kausalität, Substanz) (notabene)

154a Now, the complex unity of substance has a difficult implication, which could scarcely be entertained today, but which follows from Aristotle's view with strict logical necessity: it is impossible, according to this understanding of the interdependence of causes, for new forms to come to be. Aristotle affirmed the eternality of the species, and it should be clear that he could do nothing else. A whole that is in the strictest ontological sense greater than the sum of its parts cannot be "cobbled together" from those parts. Take a frog: an organism of this sort represents the integration of causality to such an extent that the efficient, formal, and final cause are in this case one and the same (it is the frog, the what of the thing, that moves itself, and it does so in order to be a frog in the fullest sense it can). The material cause, though not in any genuine sense identical to form, nevertheless remains intrinsic to it so that there never exists frogness "as such," but only as individual frogs. Because of this integration, it would be impossible to assemble a frog in the manner of Frankenstein's monster, and to the extent that one could approximate such a thing, it would inevitably serve an extrinsic purpose, which means it would not be an "entelechia," as properly befits an organism. In a proper substance, none of the four causes, in other words, has its being, so to speak, in itself. Rather, each is a cause of the being in both the objective and subjective sense of the genitive. The substance is the absolute to which the causes are relative, it is the essential reference point for the understanding of each. Thus, for Aristotle, substance must be eternal, a frog cannot be produced out of something more basic, but can come only from other, already actualized, frogs. If it did come from something more basic, it would be reducible back to that or those most basic things, which would then represent eternal substance themselves. In this case, what appeared to be the reality would not be the genuine reality.2 Strict novelty, in any event, is impossible for Aristotle; even the creation of apparently original artifacts is the expression of forms that have been derived from other more basic forms, and cannot be said to have been generated from nothing. (Fs) (notabene)

155a We thus appear to stand before a dilemma. On the one hand, we have an integrated causality that represents the condition of possibility for all intelligibility, but to affirm this would require us to accept the eternal reality of substances, for any whole greater than the sum of its parts cannot simply be constructed step by step out of its parts. But this is an essentially "static" notion of the cosmos; it denies development, and very clearly denies the possibility of anything like an evolution of species. It would seem to deny, moreover, the possibility of creation, if one thinks of this divine act as an alternative to the eternality of species. There thus appears to be good reason to reject this understanding of being. On the other hand, actually to do so would present an even more obviously problematic implication: it would entail the dis-integration of the causes, and therefore a purely mechanistic conception of the universe and all things in it, coincident with the loss of any foundation for intelligibility, so that, if there is to be meaning at all, it is forced to fix its outer limits at the hermetically sealed borders of self-enclosed reason. What, in this situation, are we to do? (Fs) (notabene)

156a One might anticipate that it was precisely the worldview brought by Christianity that undid the integration of Aristotle's eternal substances, insofar as the doctrine of creation means that all things in the cosmos "come to be," at least in some respect. But this would only be the case in principle if indeed the sense of being entailed in the doctrine of creation were incompatible with the absoluteness of substance. As Thomas Aquinas shows, there is no contradiction in principle between the world's being created and its being eternal. As he indicates in the short treatise On the Eternity of the World, it is a mistake to think that efficient causality can operate only according to temporal succession.3 While it is true that efficient causality implies a "before" and an "after," he explains, these terms need not indicate an order of time (as they essentially do in Hume, and "before" him in Galileo), but can also indicate an order of nature.4 In other words, the causality of creation does not necessarily imply an event in time, but can simply mean absolute metaphysical dependence — even, in principle, of eternal things. In this respect, Aquinas affirms that the Platonic notion that the world is both eternal and wholly dependent on God is not offensive to reason. (Fs)

Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Schindler, David C., Jun, The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: Substanz - Ewigkeit

Index: Kausalität 6j; Schöpfung - Zeit - Substanz - esse; Sein als Aktualität, begrenzt durch Form; S.: vertikale - horizontale Entfaltung; Möglichkeitsbedingung d. S. nicht vorher in der Zeit, sondern Natur; Evolution fordert Schöpfung

Kurzinhalt: if there is a subsistent being at all, its conditions of possibility were not given merely in the temporal moment prior to its actuality, but rather that its possibility is given simultaneously with its actuality, which transcends time by definition.

Text: 159a Now, while we might be able to imagine in some distant way that God created the world together with time in the distant past, it does not seem to be the case that individual beings are created "immediately," in the manner described. If they were, we would expect to see beings "pop up" into existence literally "out of nowhere." Is it not the case that the beings that make up the world have come to be gradually insofar as they evidently did not exist at the beginning of the universe — something that not only modern science, but Aquinas too seems to have held?9 If this is the case, it seems to contradict the claim we have repeatedly made that substances have an absolute character that does not allow them to be reduced back to anything less than they. There are two points to make in response to this difficulty: first, the absoluteness of substance precludes a "coming to be" from below, but does not preclude a coming to be, so to speak, from above. But such a "coming to be" requires a kind of actuality that is distinct from, and indeed superior to, the actuality of form. Aquinas presents this kind of actuality in his notion of esse, the existence that God shares with the beings he makes be, or the act by which all forms themselves are actualized.10 Esse, according to Aquinas, is formal with respect to all form because it is the actuality of all (formal) acts.11 In this respect, it is that to which the actuality of real beings can be reduced. It is not a potentiality out of which forms are generated "from below," but is rather an excess, so to speak, of actuality that is limited "from below" by the forms to be actualized.12 Because esse, moreover, is not itself a subsistent being, but is rather a substantial-izing act, the reducibility of form to esse does not eliminate the absoluteness of individual substances. To the contrary, it is precisely what makes them absolute. (Fs) (notabene)

160a The second point to make is a more speculative development: it is true that no substance can exist merely temporally; the sheer multiplicity of time is incompatible with any sort of subsisting being. A fortiori a subsistent being does not come to be merely in time. Once we recognize this we are able to say that, if there is a subsistent being at all, its conditions of possibility were not given merely in the temporal moment prior to its actuality, but rather that its possibility is given simultaneously with its actuality, which transcends time by definition. What this means is that we cannot think of the coming-to-be of substances merely "horizontally," but must rather think of them "vertically" as unfolding in time from above. We will explore this notion more fully in the following chapter. The condition of possibility, in any event, does not precede in time but rather in nature, and the reference point for understanding the process lies not in the first moment, and then each succeeding moment thereafter, but in the form that lies above the temporal process altogether. At the same time, of course, the form reciprocally depends on the temporal process for its coming to be in reality, but this dependence is asymmetrical: the substance's dependence on its history lies so to speak inside the history's dependence on the substance. The passage we cited above expresses this point quite nicely: God gives time to the effect that he creates, which we may read as generously allowing it to develop gradually into what it has always been meant to be. (Fs)

160b The inclusion of the horizontal dimension of being within the vertical dimension allows the possibility of a kind of evolution in the biological sphere, even though it precludes a purely mechanistic account of that evolution. It should be noted that, despite claims to the contrary, evolution cannot in any event be accounted for in wholly mechanistic terms insofar as mechanism excludes the possibility of natural forms and therefore of genuine substances.13 This means, ironically, that not only are creation and evolution not opposed in principle, but in fact evolution requires creation to be intelligible at all as the gradual coming to be of real beings. Chesterton captures this point quite well:

Evolution is a good example of that modern intelligence which, if it destroys anything, destroys itself. Evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself. If evolution destroys anything, it does not destroy religion but rationalism. If evolution simply means that a positive thing called an ape turned very slowly into a positive thing called a man, then it is stingless for the most orthodox; for a personal God might just as well do things slowly as quickly, especially if, like the Christian God, he were outside time. But if it means anything more, it means that there is no such thing as an ape to change, and no such thing as a man for him to change into. It means that there is no such thing as a thing. At best, there is only one thing, and that is a flux of everything and anything. This is an attack not upon the faith, but upon the mind; you cannot think if there are no things to think about. You cannot think if you are not separate from the subject of thought. Descartes said, "I think; therefore I am." The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, "I am not; therefore I cannot think."14

161a The reason that there cannot be evolution without creation is because, as we have seen, there can be no intelligibility of any sort without the absoluteness of substance, which the supra-temporal and indeed the supra-formal act of creation alone — if one does not affirm the eternity of species — makes possible. As we have come to see, this acknowledgment of intelligibility requires an inversion of our normal way of thinking that limits physical being to the flux of time, and demands instead that we see time as belonging to things, as unfolding from above in reference to what transcends things. The physical world does indeed exist in time, but not reductively so: all real beings "stick out" ec-statically into the eternity of the God who made them from nothing and "continues" so to make them. The dis-integration of causes is a natural result of the failure to interpret creation thus metaphysically and the subsequent temporalization of being. A recovery of their integration, a restoration of the wholeness of things and thus the basis of any thinking whatsoever, will therefore require a restoration of a proper sense of being as created. (Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Substanz - Akzidenz

Autor, Quelle: Schindler, David C., Jun, The Catholicity of Reason

Titel: Substanz - Evolution - Schöpfung

Index: Kausalität 6i; Ewigkeit der Welt (Aristoteles) - Thomas; Nicht-Sein nicht zeitlich "früher" als Sein (Ordnung der Zeit d. Natur); Substanz transzendiert Zeit: Th.: Ewigkeit unterschieden von Zeit durch Prinzip der Ganzheit

Kurzinhalt: Composite wholes — whether we call them substances in Aristotle's sense or subsistent beings in Aquinas's — remain absolute in the doctrine of creation, which means that this doctrine entails an integrated notion of causality.

Text: 156b There are some who believe that Aquinas means to present this ancient view as a possibility for reason; guided by the Christian faith, however, which affirms the creation in time of all things and so denies the eternity of the world, we ought to reject this possibility in favor of the other reasonable possibility, namely, that all things come to be in time. If this were the case, one would wonder why he would write an entire treatise on behalf of a position he considers false.1 But there is another way to interpret Aquinas regarding this question. If we consider Aquinas's metaphysical exposition of creation in the Summa, we realize that, for Aquinas, this ancient philosophical notion regarding the eternity of the world is and remains in some respect true, even if this truth does not contradict the affirmation that all things have come to be. We are approaching the height of paradox here, but it is reason that is leading us to it. One of the constant themes in Aquinas's exposition of the notion of creation is that the proper terminus of God's creative act is the particular subsistent being, what Aristotle calls the substance: "Creation does not mean the building up of a composite thing from pre-existing principles; but it means that the composite is created so that it is brought into being at the same time with all of its principles."2 The reason for this is that we can attribute being to parts — for example, to form and to matter — only analogously insofar as they contribute to the reality of things. But being belongs in the proper sense "to that which has being — that is, to what subsists in its own being."3 Aquinas in other words affirms Aristotle's notion that it is wholes, composite beings, that are what is most real, and that other aspects of the world have their reality always relative to these wholes. In this respect, a human being would be more real, for example, than the genes that make him up. He is more real than an atom, or indeed even more than a rock or a tree, insofar as a human being has more independence than they. Composite wholes — whether we call them substances in Aristotle's sense or subsistent beings in Aquinas's — remain absolute in the doctrine of creation, which means that this doctrine entails an integrated notion of causality. (Fs; tblStw: Substanz, Zeit)

Fußnote 1 oben: 31. "Further, let us even suppose that the preposition 'out of' imports some affirmative order of non-being to being, as if the proposition that the creature is made out of nothing meant that the creature is made after nothing. Then this expression 'after' certainly implies order, but order is of two kinds: order of time and order of nature. If, therefore, the proper and the particular does not follow from the common and the universal, it will not necessarily follow that, because the creature is made after nothing, non-being is temporally prior to the being of the creature. Rather, it suffices that non-being be prior to being by nature. Now, whatever naturally pertains to something in itself is prior to what that thing only receives from another. A creature does not have being, however, except from another, for, considered in itself, every creature is nothing, and thus, with respect to the creature, non-being is prior to being by nature. Nor does it follow from the creature's always having existed that its being and non-being are ever simultaneous, as if the creature always existed but at some time nothing existed, for the priority is not one of time. Rather, the argument merely requires that the nature of the creature is such that, if the creature were left to itself, it would be nothing." On the Eternity of the World, trans. Robert T. Miller.

157a The question that arises, here, is whether this absoluteness of wholes presents a difficulty for the temporal coming to be of the world that is entailed in the Christian belief in creation in time. On the one hand, Aquinas affirms that substances as such imply the transcendence of time — "time does not measure the substance of things"4 — and for this reason, because demonstration concerns the essence of things (which represents their non-temporal aspect), creation in time cannot be demonstrated. This implies that a "supra-temporal" aspect of being is essential to its intelligibility, which is what we have argued with respect to the notion of causality. Indeed, Aquinas specifically distinguishes eternity from time by the principle of wholeness: eternity is simultaneously whole, while time is not.5 We may infer from this that, insofar as something is whole, and to that extent it represents something essentially greater than and irreducible to its parts, that thing transcends time. It is important to see the implication: it is not simply a part of a substance — for example, the abstract form or the "ideal" reality of the thing — that transcends time, but that each individual substance must transcend time precisely to the extent that the substance represents an irreducible unity. This does not mean the thing does not exist in time, but only that its temporal reality is not the whole of its reality. Again, it is just this transcendence of time that makes it intelligible. But faith does not contradict reasoning; the light of faith does not obscure the light of reason. This means that the new context into which faith introduces the being of the world preserves the intelligibility, and therefore the time-transcending character, of being even as it transforms it. The sharpest question we must ask, then, is how does the origin in time of things not eliminate the supra-temporal integrity of their intelligible reality? (Fs) (notabene)

158a We cannot here explore this question in all the depth that it demands, but we may nonetheless draw principles of a response to it from Aquinas. Precisely because substance necessarily has an "all at once" quality, it cannot as we said come into being incrementally. Moreover, insofar as creation is a divine act, it does not itself take place in time, as a movement or a change, which always implies the succession of moments. Thus, Aquinas affirms that the world is created simultaneously with time: "Things are said to be created in the beginning of time ... because together with time heaven and earth were created."6 Indeed, God does not "take time," as it were, to create, but rather "He must be considered as giving time to His effect as much as and when He willed."7 It is manifestly not the case that, for example, the matter is first created as a potential to receive at a later moment the form that actualizes it. This would leave form and matter extrinsic to each other in a way that would not allow us to make sense of organic beings, the epitome of the real. To the contrary, not only is no matter present prior to God's creation of subsistent beings, but no possibility is present — or rather, if there is a possibility it lies wholly in God's will.8 God does not operate within the limits of the conditions of possibility, but he gives those conditions in giving being. It is in this sense that each real, subsistent being is created "all at once," specifically as a whole. (Fs)