Against the Real Distinction of Essence and Existence

In what follows I post some arguments against the real distinction of the Thomists by the super-famous thinker Himbertus de Garda. They are from a fascinating article that I have been meaning to do a post on, as it is full of material to delight both loremasters and the most hard-headed of philosophers. Here's the citation: William Duba, Christopher Schabel,  "Ni chose, ni non-chose: The Sentences-Commentary of Hibertus de Garda, OFM," Bulletin de Philosophie medievale 53 (2011), 149-232

Reminder of the meanings of the terms:

A distinctio ex natura rei is any distinction obtaining apart from the activity of the intellect, including the divine intellect.

A distinctio realis (or distincta realiter) is a distinction between entities that can exist without each other. Probably a subset of the ex natura rei distinction. Sometimes, as in the case of body and soul, only one of the items can exist without the other.

A distinctio formalis obtains ex natura rei but the items so distinguished (definitions, quiddities, formalities, parts of definitions, etc.) are not separable.

Ratio: probably here means definition, or a formal nature.

From Himbertus, Rep IA d. 36 a. 2 (ed D-S, 199-200):

There is a second mode of speaking, which is of our Doctor [=Scotus], that essence and actual existence are not really distinguished. Which is proved thus: whenever some things are really distinct, and one descends from the other, if that which descends is real, then that which remains will be real, as is clear regarding whiteness in a wall; but actual existence descends from essence, and essence remains,  and nevertheless is not real; therefore they are not really distinguished.

The second argument: if essence and actual existence are really distinguished, essence will actually exist without actual existence, because whenever some things differ really, one is able to be [esse] without the other; but essence is not able to actually exist without actual existence; therefore they are really the same.

Here are two doubts. It is said that essence is distinguished from actual existence: is it distinguished formally? I say that it is not, because when some things have the same definitional and quidditative ratio, they are the same formally; but essence and actual existence have the same definitional and quidditative ratio; therefore they are the same formally. The major premise is proved, for the formal ratio is taken from the definitional and quidditative ratio. The minor premise is also clear, because neither something else nor a new quiddity is acquired through actual existence.

Second thus: that which does not vary the formal ratio of something does not differ formally from that which it does not vary; but actual existence does not vary the formal ratio of essence; therefore it does not differ formally from it.

The second doubt is if essence and actual existence are distinguished ex natura rei. I say that they are, because whenever it is the case that something befalls one which does not befall the other, those are distinguished ex natura rei, if it befalls them ex natura rei; but it befalls essence that it is not in act, but in potency, and [it befalls] actual existence that it is in act; therefore they are distinguished ex natura rei.

Again, it befalls essence that it is indifferent to being and non being; but actual existence is not indifferent, because it is in act. Whence I say that actual existence and essence are the same really.

Gilson on the Essence-Existence Distinction

I don't normally like to rag on Gilson since he was unquestionably a great scholar, but I can't pass up the following comment on De ente et essentia where Gilson gives the essence-existence distinction the status of a first principle, which, conveniently enough, can't be proven but only seen. Tough luck for those less subtle and impure minds like Scotus, Henry and the myriads who foolishly wanted proof of the disitnction.

Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, 82:

The large number of Christian philosophers and theologians, even among the so-called Thomists, who have rejected the distinction of essence and existence understood in its Thomistic meaning, clearly shows that no demonstration is here at stake. Above all, the careful procedure of Thomas Aquinas himself in handling the notion invites us to consider it less as the conclusion of some dialetical argument than as a prime source of intelligibility whose existence is known by the very light it sheds upon all the problems in metaphysics. So Thomas Aquinas will not attempt to prove it, but we shall see him progressively leading us to it, stating from the very demonstrations of the existence of God, as if it were for him a question of purifying our sight until it becomes able to stand the light of the first principle.

Henry of Ghent on Aquinas and Existence

For Thomists the "real distinction" between essence and existence is a bedrock principle of metaphysics. Often (e.g. Jacques Maritain in Preface to Metaphysics et al.) a Thomist will speak as though the real distinction is one of the first and most obvious metaphysical truths that can be known. It's one of the principal "Thomistic Theses" and St Thomas uses it constantly, for instance here, in Summa Theologiae I.104.1 (For the Latin see the Logic Museum):

Therefore as the becoming of a thing cannot continue when that action of the agent ceases which causes the "becoming" of the effect: so neither can the "being" of a thing continue after that action of the agent has ceased, which is the cause of the effect not only in "becoming" but also in "being." This is why hot water retains heat after the cessation of the fire's action; while, on the contrary, the air does not continue to be lit up, even for a moment, when the sun ceases to act upon it, because water is a matter susceptive of the fire's heat in the same way as it exists in the fire. Wherefore if it were to be reduced to the perfect form of fire, it would retain that form always; whereas if it has the form of fire imperfectly and inchoately, the heat will remain for a time only, by reason of the imperfect participation of the principle of heat. On the other hand, air is not of such a nature as to receive light in the same way as it exists in the sun, which is the principle of light. Therefore, since it has not root in the air, the light ceases with the action of the sun.

Now every creature may be compared to God, as the air is to the sun which enlightens it. For as the sun possesses light by its nature, and as the air is enlightened by sharing the sun's nature; so God alone is Being in virtue of His own Essence, since His Essence is His existence; whereas every creature has being by participation, so that its essence is not its existence. Therefore, as Augustine says (Gen. ad lit. iv, 12): "If the ruling power of God were withdrawn from His creatures, their nature would at once cease, and all nature would collapse." In the same work (Gen. ad lit. viii, 12) he says: "As the air becomes light by the presence of the sun, so is man enlightened by the presence of God, and in His absence returns at once to darkness."

Henry of Ghent paraphrases this passage in his Quodlibet I q.9, on whether a creature's essence is its being (my translation):

Those who say that in creatures the essence of a creature is one thing and its being another thing think that a creature participates in being. Whence they say that creatures are related to God as air to the sun illuminating it, for as the sun which shines by its nature, so that it is nothing other than light itself, so God has being through his nature and essence, for he is nothing other than being. And as air is of itself obscure, and of its nature is not altogether a participant in light unless it be illumined by the sun, participating through this light from the sun, so a creature of itself and of its essence does not have the character of being, but is in the darkness of nonentity, unless it be lightened by God and the being in which it participates be given to it.

After noting a different sense in which we might understand "participation", Henry goes on:

The first way of understanding the participation of a creature in being is mistaken; it is not an understanding but a phantastical imagination. For the essence of a creature should not be imagined like the air indifferent to obscurity and luminosity, but like a certain ray in itself apt to subsist, produced by the sun, not by the necessity of nature but by free will. Whence, if the sun by free will could produce a subsistent ray, that ray, inasmuch as its own nature is concerned, would be indifferent to being and non-being, and of itself would be a certain kind of non-being.

Henry goes on to explain the reason for the correction of St Thomas' image. In the image of the air being illumined by the sun the nature of the air is something different from the nature of the light or its illumination, whereas in a luminous body and the ray of light the nature of light is the same, though one light is dependent on and participates in the other. The ray which reaches our eye is not the same as the sun but is its similitude, as the creature is the similitude of God - but the air is not the similitude of the sun at all. (This seems to me to agree with the way Thomas elsewhere characterizes the essence of creatures as modes of imitability of the divine essence.) Thomas' image of the air's illumination is an image of one sort of thing being poured into another sort of thing to make it actual in a certain way, but for Henry (and, I might add, the Franciscan tradition in general along with him) existence can't be understood as a different sort of thing than the existing nature and added to it in order that it can be.

Of course, whether Henry's own account of the relation of essence and existence in terms of his intentional distinction is ultimately successful is another matter.

Ockham Quodlibet I.3

This question asks whether in God paternity is distinct from the Father. Ockham notes, "This question is not about names but about the reality." That is, logically speaking of course the abstract property "paternity" is distinguished from the concrete suppositum of whom it is predicated; but is there any distinction in reality?

Ockham notes that every distinction is either real or formal or rational. In the first case one of the two distinct things can exist apart from the other; in the third case the two distinct things are distinct only in the mind. In the second case, you have a formal distinction when you have things such that something is the same as one of the distinct things and not the other, as in: the Son is the essence and is not the Father, therefore the Father and the essence are formally distinct.

[An aside: recall that in Quod. I.2 Ockham made it clear that the accepts the formal distinction only for distinguishing the persons from the essence in God and nowhere else. Generally then he accepts only two kinds of distinction, real and rational. This is why they call it his razor! Compare with more luxurious accounts of distinctions. For instance, the Scotist Petrus Thomae in his own Quodlibet, q.7, gives a very different classification of distinctions. First there are distinctions of reason, founded only on a mental act, and then there are distinctions not dependent on a mental act, real distinctions. But real distinctions can be broken down into 1) Essential distinctions, between essence and essence, which can be known by separability in actual existence or by essential dependence, since nothing is dependent on itself; 2) Distinctions between thing and thing, rather than between essence and essence, which can be known e.g. by causal dependence; 3) Distinctions between reality and reality, known by whether one can be abstracted without the other; 4) Distinctions between thing and reality - the difference is that a thing has a reality belonging to it, while a reality must have a thing of which it is; 5) Distinctions between formality and formality, with multiple ways to recognize is; 6) Distinctions between formality and thing, known by the lack of adequation between the two, since one thing can have many formalities but not vice versa, or by the fact that the thing is principle and the formality something pertaining to it. Petrus Thomae has at least one other way of formulating the distinction tree, but you get the idea. Even though Scotus also recognizes the principle of parsimony, it's not called Scotus' razor for a reason.]

Anyway, Ockham says that you can't think as though the Father were constituted from the coinciding of the divine essence and active generation. There's not some property of paternity which makes the Father himself; rather the Father just is paternity in God. The Father can't be constituted by paternity, because he just is paternity, and nothing can constitute itself. Similarly the Son just is filiation in God, etc. There is a legitimate formal distinction between the Father and the divine essence and a real distinction between the Father and the Son. But those are all the distinctions there are in God which don't arise from our own thinking about him.

The Separability Criterion and the Real Distinction

In this recent post Faber presented Giles of Rome on the separability criterion for a real distinction, and its application to essence and existence. Here is the money quote:

in the way in which we find objects separated in that way they are distinct from each other. If, therefore, they are separated only in thought then they are rationally distinct; if they are really separated, they are really distinct. And although there is some doubt whether those objects which are really distinct are also really separable, there cannot be a doubt that those which are really separate are really distinct. If, indeed, an essence were always joined to an existence, it would always possess an existence and it would never be able not to exist.

But it seems to me this very criterion could be used to argue against the "real distinction". According to the separability criterion, two things are really distinct if at least one of them can exist without the other. So according to the "real distinction", either a thing's essence or its existence can "exist" without the other, or both. And Giles argues (as Thomas does) that an essence is not always joined to an existence, ergo etc. But what else is this than to say that the essence "exists" without existence, either in the divine mind or in a created intellect? But if the essence exists there, is it really separated from existence? It seems not. Now, perhaps we don't want to call the kind of being an essence has in the mind existence. This seems right. But then there also seems to be reason to question whether the essence as it "exists" in the mind and as it exists in reality are numerically the same. Arbority in the mind and arbority as it exists as a formal component of this existent oak tree have the same formal ratio, that is, share in the same common nature; to that extent they are identical; but that formal ratio undergoes no change when the oak tree is created. It's not a subject which is actualized. The tree-ish act is not the act of the common nature, but the act of the substance, namely, this individual form united to this matter. And before the tree comes into existence this form, which qua arbority shares the same common nature with the concept in the mind, has no separate being. Since the act of existence is the act of a real singular form, and since the form which exists in the mind is identical with the real singular form only specifically and not numerically, it seems that before the singular form exists in act it is simply nothing. Therefore it is never separated from existence, and therefore it is not really distinct from it.

I have to admit that I am none too sure about this argument. As a matter of fact it seems more problematic for Scotus' metaphysics than for Thomas'. Since Thomas does not admit that there is a singular form in the same sense that Thomas does, it's easier to say that the universal essence is not identical with the form as actualized by the singular existence. Since there is no "Socrateity" in the mind of God we don't have to worry about the unique singularity of Socrates' essence. For Scotus, however, there is such a singular form, and so it would be easier to argue that Socrateity as distinct from Socrates' existence is present in the mind. The question I suppose is whether the ratio of the pre-created Socrateity in the divine mind is numerically identical with Socrateity as existing in Socrates. This bears more thinking about, since I'm not yet sure what to think.

Reflecting on Essence and Existence

I wanted to address some of what commenter "AT" says in this thread, not because I have a burning urge to refute him, but because this is a topic I'm none too sure of myself and I'd like to reflect on it. So I hope our commenter will forgive my using his remarks as a springboard. He writes:

To say something that doesn't exist has a potency to exist doesn't seem to make sense. If true this would mean the things created by God had a potency to be created. Where would this potency come from? Not from God because in God there is no potency. Also, creation was a free act of God and didn't depend on anything else.

I think that many theologians would admit that "the things created by God had a potency to be created". This potency doesn't come from anywhere except the intrinsic properties of the essences themselves. Now, the commenter makes two claims, each of which is true in one sense and - according to some theories at least - false in another respect.

1) The potency to be created cannot come from God because there is no potency in God.

I think we need to distinguish, as Faber does, between active and passive potency. God can't have passive potency whereby something other that himself can cause anything about or in him. But God can and does have an active potency to cause things other than himself.

I think that we would want to say that the "creatibility" of essences before creation comes from God, not insofar as he has the ability to create them, but insofar as he understands them. That is, the active potency of God to create (in the example) a rose, comes from, and is logically posterior to, his understanding of the essence of a rose, whether or not he decides ever to create any. "AT" says in another comment, "I think you will agree that God knows things which have never existed, don't now exist, and will never exist. In what sense could they be said to have a potency to exist?" To which I reply, that have a potency to exist insofar as they can exist but do not. It can't be the case the essence of a rose in itself is posterior to its existence, since it had to be an "existible" object, intelligible to the mind of God and willable by his will, in order for it to be created. This is because a rose has an intrinsic intelligible structure, a nature, a quod quid erat esse, which can be grasped and expressed whether there is an actually existing rose. This essence exists in the mind of God as an exemplar, a divine idea, and the existent rose is conforms to it, in a way analogous to the way the concept of the rose in our minds conforms to the essence as existing in the real rose.

To show that the essence pre-exists in the mind of God, before God decides to create it, we can advert to the (presumed) fact that there are other possible kinds of flowers which God also knows about, but has never created and will never create. The essences of these flowers remain externally non-existent, in the sense that there are no such flowers, but there still are such essences, in the sense that they are possible and God knows them to be such.

2) Creation is a free act of God and doesn't depend on anything else.

From the foregoing we can infer that creation, while indeed a free act, does depend on something else, namely the prior understanding of what is to be created, not as a cause of the act of creation per se, but as a sine qua non. For if the essence to be created was not an intelligible structure and if it were not already understood in the mind of God, God could never will to create it. This is no way compromises the freedom of divine action, since the act of understanding something as creatible in no way determines that it should be created, but it is a necessary condition (as Faber said a little while back, it's an essentially ordered co-cause).

The difficulty of the "real distinction" is that it treats essences as though they are the matter of existence. Just as matter, according to St Thomas, does not exist until actualized by some form, so form does not exist until actualized by existence. Can an essence, like the nature of a rose, be thought of in this respect?

But if we don't want to think of the form or essence as a potential principle, then we have to grapple with this separability criterion - which amounts to the claim that the essence can "exist" in the mind of man or of God, but without "existing" in its own right. Since the essences of elanor and simbelmyne "are", in the sense that I can tell you what sort of flowers they are and what their natural habitats are and what are the differences between them, and yet since they do not exist, since the flowers are fictional and there aren't any, it seems that it isn't true that if there is an essence then a thing of which it is the essence exists.

There's lots more to think about here, and perhaps I'll come back to it soon.

Giles of Rome on the Real Distinction

Aegidius Romanus, Theoremata de esse et essentia (transl. M. Murray, p.61-62):

Theorem 12: "Everything that exists, except the First Being, is not its own existence, but it has an essence really distinct from existence and by reason of the former it is a being and by reason of the latter it is an existant."

[...]

"We ought to note, nevertheless, that some objects can be separated actually; others only in thought. Therefore, in the way in which we find objects separated in that way they are distinct from each other. If, therefore, they are separated only in thought then they are rationally distinct; if they are really separated, they are really distinct. And although there is some doubt whether those objects which are really distinct are also really separable, there cannot be a doubt that those which are really separate are really distinct. If, indeed, an essence were always joined to an existence, it would always possess an existence and it would never be able not to exist. Therefore, because sensible natures are able not to exist or because they are not always joined to existence, because they begin to exist sometime, we can say that they are in potency to existence and that they have no essence really distinct from existence."

There we have it, Giles of Romes' famous or, if your name is Cunningham, infamous separability criterion added to the real distinction. This set of theorems was Giles' first examination of the topic, save perhaps for his Sentences. Henry reacted to this treatise, which prompted a series of quodlibetal debates between the two. Giles eventually wrote a series of disputed questions about essence and existence, attacking Henry and clarifying his own position. This debate seems to have been heavily influential for the way in which later scholastics interpreted the formal distinction, although the only real literature on this is from thomist scholars, who have notorious blindspots. The separability criterion was certainly incorporated by Scotus and his early followers, and probably became standard among other schools as well. The first question of Peter Thomae's QQ. de modis distinctionis is about it, for example. Comparing this with Thomas of Sutton's version of the real distinction, which is obtains between anything distinct prior to the operation of the intellect, one could note that neither are explicitly found in the writings of Aquinas himself, but have been filled in by his later students (which has provided fodder for plenty of modern thomists, who, forgetting that thomism was not always as dominant as it was from the period 1879-1965, generally attack both for their alleged weak adherence to thomistic doctrine). It would be an interesting study to see if other theologians advanced similar views in the 1280's and on, and to see if the version of Thomas of Sutton might be the Oxford real distinction while that of Giles the Parisian real distinction. But that I will leave to the Thomists.

Here is another quote, from the introduction, p.ix:

"A clear thread runs from Duns Scotus, through William of Ockham to Suarez in the explanation of the distinction between essence and existence. There has been, on the part of these men, a violent reaction to the real distinction between essence and existence, as proposed by St. Thomas. This opposition is based on their rejection of essence and existence as real physical entities which, so they thought, would be required in the real distinction of St. Thomas. In other word, for these men the real distinction is only valid if applied to physical entities which are separable. Such, of course, is not the doctrine of St. Thomas; nevertheless these men have rejected the real distinction for this reason. Why historically this particular doctrine of physical entities was involved in the Thomistic real distinction is not, at the present time, so clear as historians of philosophy would like. It does seem, however, that Giles of Rome is at least partly responsible for this identification of the real distinction with physical entities."

Scotus vs. Henry

Again. This time Scotus objects to Henry of Ghent's characterization of necessity in the Trinitarian processions. From Ordinatio I. Dist. 10.29:

Praeterea, quae necessitas distinguendi inter voluntatem quam ponit principium eliciendi actum, et naturam quam ponit coassistere voluntati elicienti, si tantum est inter ista distinctio rationis, sicut videtur alibi sentire de distinctione attributorum in divinis?

"Furthermore, how is it necessary to distinguish between the will which he posits as the principle of eliciting the act, and the nature which he posits as co-assisting the eliciting will, if there is only a distinction of reason between the two, as it seems elsewhere to think is the case with the divine attributes in God?"

So Henry makes a distinction between two principles in one place, and in another place says or implies that the distinction is only a distinction of reason and not something in reality, negating the explanatory force the distinction had in the first place.

I bring this up because I've seen Henry pull this exact same move in another context. In his Quodlibet IV.16, on spiritual composition, he says that there are various distinct principles in the angels which can account for its real non-simplicity. In order to make sense of the relevant distinctions he sends the reader to his Summa, where he makes a number of relevant distinctions, ranks them in a hierarchy of more and less compositive, and then ruins the whole thing by making it clear that they are all merely intentional distinctions. So where's the real composition?

I haven't read enough Henry to see if he does this sort of thing all the time, but it's pretty fishy.

Thomas of Sutton on the Real Distinction

One of the difficulties that arises when discussing Scotus' formal distinction is just what kind of distinction it is supposed to be. Is it midway between a distinction of reason and a real distinction, or a version of a real distinction? This is complicated by some terminological differences between Scotus' Oxford and Parisian accounts. A necessary first step is figuring out what a real distinction is. Big surprise, there is no standard scholastic account of what a real distinction is. Nothing explicit in Aquinas, save for the bit in De ente et essentia that to conceive of an essence apart from an existence is sufficient for their being really distinct in reality. Giles of Rome works this into a theory in which a real distinction obtains between entities that are separable (more on this later). Thomas of Sutton (died after 1319), whose texts I give below, thought that a real distinction was one that existed subjectively in the thing under consideration apart from the consideration of an intellect. This probably reflects the context of his Quodlibeta, which contain a great deal of polemic against Henry of Ghent; the passage at the end of the post is from a discussion of the distinction of divine attributes, an area of dispute that really exploded after Henry's Quodlibet V q. 1, disputed in 1280. Scotus employs both senses of the real distinction (the Aegidian and the Suttonian) in the Ordinatio, though only the Suttonian makes an appearance in his discussion of the formal distinction of divine attributes. Anyway, here is the beginnings of a list:

1. Distinctio ex natura rei (everyone, including Aquinas and Scotus, use this one without defining it)

2. Distinctio realiter:

a. separability criterion (Giles of Rome)

b. in subject prior to intellective operations (Thomas of Sutton)

Note that this is just from the Aquinas' followers, Dominican and Augustinian. I'll post more later on the Franciscans.

Thomas de Suttona, Quodlibet III q. 1 (ed. Schmaus 342):

"Unde haec est differentia inter distinctionem realem et distinctionem secundum rationem quod illa, quae distinguuntur realiter, habent in se subiective suam realem distinctionem, sicut patet de albedine et dulcedine in lacte. Sed illa, quae distinguuntur secundum rationem in aliqua re, non habent in illa re tamquam in subiecto suam distinctionem secundum rationem, sed solum tamquam in obiecto. Illa autem distinctio secundum rationem est in intellectu distinguente ut in subiecto et per comparationem ad intellectum, in quo est distinctio realis. Sed distinctio secundum rationem dicitur per comparationem ad obiectum, circa quod ratiocinatur."

Translation:

Whence this is the difference between a real distinction and a distinction according to reason: that those things, which are really distinguished, have subjectively in themselves their own real distinction, just as is clear regarding whiteness and sweetness in milk. But those things, which are distinguished according to reason in some thing, do not have in that thing just as in a subject their own distinction according to reason, but only as in an object. That distinction according to reason is in the intellect distinguishing as in a subject and by comparison to the intellect, in which there is a real distinction. But a distinction according to reason is said by comparison to an object around which reasons.