Feb 08 2001
Thomas Aquinas and the Reification of Esse
essay by Brian Charles Clark
1. Word and Community in the Middle Ages
The response of western Europeans to the gradual disintegration of the Roman Empire was to head for the hills. The unthwartable human desire for communitarian order soon led to the formation of the system of monasteries, convents, and religious lay orders. The absence of Roman law, and its upholders, the legions of soldiers formerly stationed at strategic, or at least convenient, locations around the Empire, left civil defense in the hands of the locals. If for centuries the wall had been forgotten, defensible walls now were built again. The best offense, after all, has long been a good defense. Starting in about the sixth century, the system of enclosed and largely self-sufficient monasteries replaced the former sociocultural organization of urban trade centers. Especially in the north, subject to attack from the “pagan” Vikings, and the south, subject to attack from the Islamic Saracens, these walled enclaves became the seeds of a renewed urbanity in the later Middle Ages. (For a clear-eyed history of the Dark and Middle Ages, I recommend The City in History
If this period of history is sometimes called the Dark Ages, it is only dark from our perspective. The later flowering of the Middle Ages overshadows and causes scholars to forget the important contributions made during this time. This is especially true of Visigothic Spain. Jutting off the vast Asian continent to the far southwest of the European panhandle, Spain was one of the first areas to lose the protection of the Romans, and the first to stabilize under “barbarian” rule.
It is in Seville of the ninth century that we find one of the great figures of history, Isidore the Encyclopedist. Little remembered today, Isidore wrote down, in epitomized form, the totality of intellectual knowledge of his day. Isidore’s most important work was his Etymologies, which remained commonly available through frequent editions well into the seventeenth century. Isidore’s Etymologies, written around the year 830, deserves our attention today for a number of reasons. The first is that this single book, although centuries removed from the neo-Platonists, and ignorant of Aristotle’s work, contains both the Platonic theory of forms, especially as it relates to the philosophy of language, and the Aristotelian divisions of knowledge. This division of knowledge, after reconnecting with the work of Aristotle when it became available again in the West in about 1150, became the basis for the university and the liberal arts curriculum. It is with the Etymologies, then, wherein the founding assumptions of modern pedagogy lie. (For general information on Isidore, I’ve relied on An Encyclopedist of the Dark Ages: Isidore of Seville. For the editions of the Etymologies, see note 3 on page 17.)
These assumptions are betrayed clearly in the standard of beginning medieval scholarship, Previté-Orton’s Shorter Cambridge Medieval History. On page 150 of the first volume we may read of “the Archbishop Isidore of Seville”, the Dark Age’s “greatest” exemplar of the clergyman. Isidore’s “encyclopedia, the Etymologiae, was copied and read throughout the West, and was a treasure-house of knowledge, infected indeed to puerility with decadence and barbarism. It was a potent formative influence during the Middle Ages.” Previté-Orton’s History consistently judges the value of the epistemological content of medieval documents and events, while I find their worth as evidence of our human, ontological history.
In this regard, it is Isidore’s conception and treatment of the word that is of significance here. For it is in the Etymologies that the culmination of a long linguistic process becomes complete. This process is the conflation, or confusion, of the invocation of the divine with certain words with the word itself. In Plato’s Cratylus, we see Socrates arguing against this nascent position as represented in the person of Cratylus. Although by now well and truly forgotten, Isidore’s small book reveals a “missing link” between the iconicity of language defended by Cratylus, and the formalism of the Scholastics of the Middle Ages. I might describe Isidore as a “per se” literalist. He is both clinging to, and protecting or retrenching (by epitomizing), a literary tradition that considers language epistemologically self-reflexive, and essential to any possible answer to the problem of ontological change. Isidore’s etymologies, then, are not interesting so much for their science of language as for the position the book holds in the history of ideas about the word. For the book already shows the compositional style that Aquinas would later employ: the “walled off” sections or arguments, where the epitomizing or gnomic tendency to summarize complex questions of philosophy in a sentence or two gains ascendance. In Isidore the sentence itself becomes divine; the word is sacred because it has been substituted for any architecturally exterior source of ontological causation. Isidore was by no means alone in this “safe keeping” process of philosophizing, and it occurred least of all in written work, which are merely the epitomies of a vibrant, if walled in, oral culture.
The monk-scholars spent much time arguing philosophical questions. I imagine at least some of this occurred while performing routine, perhaps repetitive tasks. The work of building, of prepairing buildings, of making and moving bricks and stones, of carving and writing, pervades the style of medieval argumentation. Everything comes in discrete chunks. A question is posed, for example, Does God exist? The answer comes in a complex system of building blocks. The individual blocks themselves may be composed of further “subroutines.” Indeed, the relation of epistemological modes of medieval metaphysical speculation and the composition of software programs has not escaped the attention of at least a few of the early computer scientists, Warren McColluch, for example. Our post-Einsteinian perspective is in no way more advantaged in terms of answering first questions of ontological status, except perhaps that we may now begin to frame such questions in terms of the history of consciousness.
The intellectual culture of the Middle Ages might be thought of as architecturally hungry. The desire to create structure is consensual; it is the orientation of the structure that is hotly, richly disputed. And there is indeed a geographical sensibility to texts during the medieval period. The works of Plato and the neo-Platonists, and then Aristotle, and routed through translation along the cardinal points. The freight of commentary represents a wilderness to be retaken, reconscripted for use by Church (the “generic” web) and individual enclave in the literal wilderness (the “speciated” node). This cultural phenomenon is formalized in the oral tradition of the disputatio. The disputatio gave rise to self-contained arguments, not unlike the bricks that go to build a wall, arguments of great verbal economy where the existence of God or the nature of Being, can be stated in just a few sentences. If modern scholars of the Dark and Middle Ages often are left with the impression that thought of the time was fragmented or shallow, it is because these scholars have forgotten the context of the disputatio itself: as a verbal medium smack dab in the middle of “being.” As an oral tradition, the epitomies of the Dark and Middle Ages reemerge as what they truly were: individual verses in an epic of human knowledge. Isidore, for example, only wrote down the Etymologies after 30 years, at the insistence of one of his bishop friends. His surviving letters are often extremely brief, consisting largely of expressions indicating a desire to speak again soon, face to face.
The other great trend of the Dark Ages, and again one that has been little studied in a cross-cultural context, is the redistribution of the Latin language into new semantic terrains. Although it is common knowledge that this did happen, and gave rise to the Romance languages, very little work has been done in respect to this redistribution as regards the history of philosophical ideas. It is in precisely this regard that I shall now turn to a brief examination of the medieval thought epitomized by Thomas Aquinas.
2. Arché, Esse, and Semantic Colonization
The migration of semantic meaning is, of course, a commonplace of linguistics, now as it was in the time of the pre-Socratics. Here I will look at one particular such migration, the colonization of the space once occupied by the Greek noun arché and then by the Latin verb esse, “to be.” The Greek thread might have a beginning located in Heraclitus, or is anyway attested in fragments attributed to him. The iconicity of the word finds its place in Plato, is dismissed though later misinterpreted in Aristotle, is well progressed in the writings of an Isidore or a Boethius, and is complete in the work of Aquinas.
To view this movement we need to understand what the pre-Socratics meant by arché. The word’s oldest sense is of “stating point,” but by the earliest pre-Socratic writings (as in Thales, Anaximander, et alia) has come to include the meaning “basic stuff (of the universe).” This idea of a “stuff” is quickly reified into the idea of an “underlying principle.” In all cases, arché is used in a profoundly nominative sense, a word to name all things, but there is no hint of action, of the impending verb, in its usage. It is the very problem of motion that begins the narrowing of the once vast semantic terrain of arché. That is, the question that occupied the attention of the pre-Socratic philosophers was: How is movement possible?, or to put it another way: What causes change?
As a noun, arché cannot address this problem of motion, and thereby cannot retain its semantic ground. Arché answers the “what” of composition, but certainly not the “how” of its change, and especially not “whither now.” By the time of Plato, arché has narrowed in meaning and usage, and is considered to be of dubious value to philosophers. The materialism of the pre-Socratics has been supplanted by the metaphysical questions of the Classical soul, the daimon that got Socrates into so much trouble. The word daimon begins to occupy the semantic space once held by arché, but is still completely nominative in usage. Indeed, the problem of motion, the source of change in the world, would not be given a satisfactorily verbal characterization until the time of Galileo. Until physics could catch up with metaphysics, then, the soul, as daimon, psuché, thymos, and so forth in Greek, and as anima in Latin, takes the place of arché as the now (frequently) dematerialized divine medium of living and life’s inexorable change.
It is Boethius who identifies the verb to be, Latin esse, as the prime mover of the primordial stuff, by now definitively identified as soul. The cause of being, it becomes clear, is existence itself. This semantic colonization is only possible because, as Paul Friedländer points out, “Platonists… were all too inclined to give way to word worship and dogmatism” (Plato: An Introduction, 40). Leaving aside Friedländer’s judgement of such behavior, we can see why this happened in the sociocultural context of the Middle Ages. The instability of the Dark Ages placed a premium on “being,” on maintaining enough control of one’s existence to remain alive. Being begins to become a commodified “essence” of life, one that can be contained (within protective “walls,” souls, bodies) while it is at the same time be a universal “stuff.” In short, by the time of Boethius, esse can be used in a synonymous nominative sense, as essentia, thus beginning to occupy the semantic space once held by arché. As Schmitz puts it, esse provides “the initial trans-determinacy that surmounts the diversity within being even while it unites them in the community of being” (Schmitz in Gallagher, 5). Pre-Socratic naturalism is left far behind in the Middle Ages. The wilderness was first tamed, then replaced, by the word.
As an evolutionary potentials in consciousness, the questions and contradictory answers of being have a long history. The notion of trans-determinacy that Schmitz suggests is at work as the “root and branch of Thomas’s thought” has its own roots and branchings in arché. Trans-determinacy lies at the very heart of the primordial question of motion and change: where to identify the medium of exchange between matter and energy. It is in their ontological status as answers to this question that I am grouping arché, and the soul words of the Indo-European inheritance. Although Schmitz does not mention the much broader semantic history I am pursuing here, his work clearly demonstrates the ascension of esse during the course of Aquinas’s writing life.
What Isidore, Boethius, and Aquinas do is reify, that is, they abstract from material principles, a safe-guardable answer to the problem of motion in the very word for existence. They find in esse a walled Heavenly City (Mumford’s term) founded on language. The medieval notion of “universals” demonstrates this architectonic process perfectly. The “problem of universals” gives form to a way of thinking and talking about the “open space” between the stuff of the world and its ontological presence in the human mind. What I’m arguing here is that the medieval “universal” is a linguistic structure that evolved to answer a human need for well being. The very description of the universal in medieval writings reveals its walled character: a post-Platonic “divided line” is drawn between the formal ontological “genera” of the mind and the individual “species” of the world. An enclosing wall is constructed around the wilderness of arché, and is now called esse.
This process is a significant moment in the history of human consciousness, especially since it blooms into our current predicaments with language. Atlas-like, Aquinas bore the weight of the problem of ontological change, and with his free hand wrote down meditations upon his burden. Locating ontological causation in esse relocated control of the world—from the world and its things—to language. This shift is based in the sociocultural conditions of the post-Roman era. The Roman optimism gave way before the exigencies of staying alive; a tightening of the reigns of thought in a Europe gradually stripped of its “empirical” foundation. The Latin language itself becomes a “root and branch” to be clung to for monastic refugees building walls against the wild peoples. I leave for others, or another essay, a discussion of the glaring fallacy of basing metaphysical first causes on features of human language.
