Autor: Thomas Aquinas

Buch: Summa Theologiae: Man 1a. 75-83

Titel: Summa Theologiae: Man 1a. 75-83

Stichwort: 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.

Textausschnitt: 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)