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Thesis Aquinas’s metaphysics is unintelligible without Ibn Sina

Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu Fellow
· 5 replies · 127 views
Existence & beingGreek & RomanIslamicMedieval ChristianFalsafaNeoplatonismScholasticismBoethiusIbn RushdIbn SinaProclus#aquinas#avicenna#essence-and-existence#transmission
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Where it stands

I teach metaphysics at a seminary in Enugu, and my students arrive believing that Aquinas is a Catholic synthesis of Aristotle and the Bible. That leaves out the man in the middle.

My thesis is strong: Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be understood without Ibn Sina.

The centre of Thomist metaphysics is the distinction between essence and existence: what a thing is does not include that it is, so every created being receives its existence from another, and only in God are essence and existence identical. Aquinas's early De ente et essentia states this distinction and cites Avicenna repeatedly as he does so. The distinction is not in Aristotle in that form. It reached Latin through Ibn Sina's Healing, which was translated in the twelfth century, around the same time as Aristotle's Metaphysics itself. Latin readers met the essence–existence framework as a live tool, not as a later commentary.

From that distinction flow the Thomist proof of God from contingency, the doctrine of creation as the giving of existence, and the account of the soul. Remove Ibn Sina and you don't have a slightly different Aquinas. You have a different philosophy.

I tell my students this not to diminish Aquinas but to place him correctly: in a conversation that ran through Bukhara and Isfahan before it reached Paris. It is a lesson I also teach with the Igbo idea of chi: a tradition can receive deeply from another without being swallowed.

Objections welcome. I suspect the Boethius people will have something to say.

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5 replies

For the thesis 2

  1. Layla Haddad

    For Fellow

    For, with a refinement. De ente cites Avicenna on almost every page, and the structure of its argument for the distinction follows his. But note the irony: Ibn Rushd criticised Ibn Sina for, as he read him, treating existence as an accident added to essence. Aquinas inherits the distinction from Ibn Sina and then has to defend it against the very objection Ibn Rushd raised. Both Arabic thinkers are in the room.

    Helpful · 1
  2. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    For Fellow

    For. My doctoral work is on Ibn Ṭufayl, so I live in the Andalusian side of this, and what strikes me is how routinely European histories omit the transmission. "Unintelligible" may be strong as a philosophical claim, but as a historical one it's close to right: you can't understand why the Latin debates took the shape they did in the thirteenth century without knowing what arrived from Arabic first.

Against the thesis 2

  1. Aoife Brennan

    Against Fellow

    Against "unintelligible". Boethius had already distinguished what a thing is from its being, in the De hebdomadibus, and Aquinas commented on that text. And the Liber de causis, the Arabic reworking of Proclus that Aquinas eventually recognised as derived from Proclus, gave him the language of being as received and participated. Ibn Sina is crucial, but Aquinas had several roads to the distinction. "Different without him" I'd grant; "unintelligible" I wouldn't.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Nikos Stavridis

    Against Fellow

    Partly against, from Byzantium. Aquinas's esse as act, existence as the most intimate perfection of a thing, goes beyond anything in Ibn Sina, and readers have long argued that Aquinas transformed the distinction rather than received it. If the teacher's framework is transformed, the student is intelligible on his own terms, even if not without the teacher.

    Helpful · 3

Other replies

  1. Fr. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    I'll concede to Aoife and Nikos. "Unintelligible" overstates it: Boethius and the Liber de causis are real roads, and Thomas transformed what he received. Revised thesis: Aquinas's metaphysics is not intelligible as a history without Ibn Sina, and it would have been a different philosophy without him. My students will get Boethius next week as penance.

    Helpful · 1