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Aquinas’ Phoenix

1. Read Thomas Aquinas’ little book On Being and Essence (De Ente Et Essentia in Latin). Aquinas’ text is a must-read! An online reproducible and contemporary translation by Robert Miller is at http://www.theologywebsite.com/etext/aquinas/beingandessence.shtml. A more scholarly and footnoted translation online is the Fordham version at http://www.faculty.fordham.edu/klima/Blackwell-proofs/MP_C30.pdf

The Miller translation is found above for your reference, excerpted and with my own annotations and charts.
 
b) Let’s begin with the normative use of the term substance in the 4th-century AD Nicene Creed:

There is a careful, detailed understanding of substance in traditional Western philosophy – a careful, detailed approach begun by Aristotle (384–322 BC) before Nicea and adapted by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) the later Mediaeval period centuries after Nicea. The detailed philosophical work on substance is reflected in the so-called Tree of Porphyry, but painstakingly explained by Aquinas in his tutorial On Being and Essence.

1. For starters, there is a brief but helpful introductory PowerPoint on Aquinas’ little book that’s viewable at www.ivc.edu/faculty/SFelder/Documents/Aquinas Being and Essence.ppt. You’ll find an exhaustive (and potentially exhausting!) analysis of Thomistic (or official Roman Catholic teaching) on Aquinas’ Being and Essence online at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05543b.htm.

Diagram [of “essence ß à existence”] by Karl Jaspers
 

1. There are two key concepts to keep in heart and mind here, namely essence and existence. Aquinas’ analog for the concept of essence is something that everybody knows: What a phoenix is, even though there’s no such thing as a phoenix. Think of the Harry Potter story:
   

Q. How do we (professor, student, movie viewer or author) know that a phoenix is a phoenix?
A. Via its essence.
 
Only one phoenix exists at a time. When the bird felt its death was near, every 500 to 1,461 years, it would build a nest of aromatic wood and set it on fire. The bird then was consumed by the flames. Then the phoenix would reappear sometime after its total disintegration.
 
e) Second key concept: Existence. Aquinas’ analog for the concept of existence is the human (type of) being.
 
Q. What’s the difference between the phoenix and the human being?
A. The human being (known as such essentially) also exists (it has being) – a decisive additional feature.
 
f) Crucial questions:
Q1. How do we “get” the essential concept of phoenix?
Q2. How is it that essences “stay put” so as to count as knowledge (see my dialogs Three Socratic Vignettes on Knowledge).
 
g) For the hearty appetite – and for perhaps a more pastorally usable consideration of substance and the question regarding the main lesson we learn from thinking and speaking about being or substance or essence, see Martin Heidegger’s What is Metaphysics? at http://www.wagner.wpengine.netdnacdn.com/psychology/files/2013/01/Heidegger.
There is a one-page summation of Heidegger’s rather different approach to the traditional Western philosophical understanding of essence at  http://philosophypages.com/hy/7b.htm.

Gustav Klimt, Pear Tree, 1903

Read Augustine’s Story of the Pears. Augustine’s text is a must-read! An online Loeb edition of Confessions, Book 2 with Augustine’s Latin on the left page and a formally equivalent English translation on the right begins at https://archive.org/stream/staugustinesconf01augu#page/64/mode/2up.  The translation I recommend is Maria Boulding’s, a volume in The 21st-Century Augustine series.
 
I’ve attached an older, public domain translation for your reference, with highlighted sections that will help to keep the Story of the Pears (green highlighting) in focus and in context (yellow).
 
Whether in English or with a look at the Latin for those so inclined, read it twice, please.
 

1. For a brief but fruitful (!) introduction to Augustine and this Master Metaphor read Leo Ferrari’s The Pear Theft in Augustine’s Confessions at http://www.brepolsonline.net/doi/abs/10.1484/J.REA.5.104193.

You may also enjoy the brief slideshow by Phineas Upham at http://www.slideshare.net/Sonya_B/saint-augustines-pear-theft-by-phineas-upham-12623017.
 

1. There are two key concepts to keep in heart and mind here, namely Augustine’s understanding of rightly ordered loves or ordo amoris and his understanding of freewill. For a pastoral consideration of Brian Hedge’s article Saint Augustine on Rightly Ordered Love at http://www.brianghedges.com/2013/09/saint-augustine-on-rightly-ordered-love.html.  

 

1. Second key concept: Augustine’s understanding of will or freewill sounds odd to our modern ears. This is because we have learned, either in school or by reading ethics books written since the 18th Century, a new-fangled notion of freewill as taught by intellectual trend-setters of the European Enlightenment such as Immanuel Kant (a major modern German philosopher who died in 1804).
2. In connection with Augustine, may I recommend the work of Phillip Cary? For an accessible way to consider Augustine’s conceptions of love and will as they are exhibited in Dante’s Divine Comedy, see Cary’s article The Weight of Love: Augustinian Metaphors of Movement in Dante's Souls  at https://www.academia.edu/761674/The_Weight_of_Love_Augustinian_Metaphors_of_Movement_in_Dantes_Souls. There are some fruitful illustrations for sermons and Bible classes here!

On the vital matter of philosophy of language and biblical hermeneutics for us 21st-century pastors and professors (and thoughtful students everywhere) Cary’s Augustine trilogy, particularly his thesis concerning the heterodoxy of what he has identified as – the dominant view of language in our day and particularly the language of Scripture – a common approach to the biblical text that he calls “expressionist semiotics” (a view held by Augustine, Cary argues at length) versus the orthodox view of the biblical text as “external effective means of grace” (the view held by Aquinas and Luther).

None of us Lutherans who write or teach biblical hermeneutics or philosophy of language can afford not to read and digest Cary’s Outward Signs: The Powerlessness of External Things in Augustine’s Thought. In regard to Augustine Cary is a Christian physician, so to speak, who diagnoses and then provides effective treatment for what I call “the Platonic Virus” that so often infects our thinking and pastoral care.