The Duality of Existence and Essence through St. Augustine and St. Thomas

The Duality of Existence and Essence through St. Augustine and St. Thomas

We have been studying in the course of the class the evolution of thought in the Western Civilization. This study has of course started with the Greek thinkers and philosophers. Their way of thought has had a great effect on the way the whole western civilization approached life, and the fundamental concepts behind it. Plato is the philosopher that most probably had the most influence on the way thought has evolved in western society. But his reasoning put Essence above Existence, which is in contradiction with the faith that is promoted later on by Aristotle at first, and then by the arrival of Christian thought into the western world.

Plato was the first philosopher that promoted a mode in which Essence was the Urstuff, or what he would call the Good (he also called this the world of timeless ideas). Plato's division of reality and his theory of forms have influenced all further western thought, and have also found a way to influence Saint Augustine. Saint Augustine was trying to find a way of thought that would be in accord with his moral ideas and still would be somehow rational. He found that idea in Plato's ideas, and most especially in Plotinus' interpretation of those ideas in his Enneads.

Saint Augustine then converted to Christianity Plato's thought, since this thought put a higher being (that Saint Augustine identified as God) as the foundation of the universe, and thus this fit in the Christian dogma very easily. This is where Saint Augustine became somehow contradictory with himself, since his continuous attempts to make everything a theodicy, a justification of God's existence.

Where Saint Augustine's explanations and justification failed, Saint Thomas saw a fundamental flaw, and sought for an explanation, not in more attempts at theodicy, but in a totally different approach of the Christian dogma through the interpretation of Aristotle's works. Indeed, Aristotle, even though he was Plato's student and his intellectual follower, diverged on the construction of his universe. Aristotle believed in a more Existential point of view, in which "he could discover no decisive reason for denying that the world always existed instead of being created at a point in time." (S. Stumpf, 1994, p. 179). This is very contradictory with Saint Augustine's Essentialist view, and also contradictory with the church's dogma. Saint Thomas didn't contradict the church on many things though, since his interpretation of Aristotle retains the idea of the Unmoved Mover as God, and the fact that everything is therefore caused by God.