Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle

;\LL STUDENTS of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas ..Ll. readily admit that the saint �was greatly influenced by the thought of Aristotle. The question of the extent to which St. Thomas was influenced by Aristotle, however, has long been a subject of discussion, and understandably so, since the role Thomists assign to Aristotle in the thought of St. Thomas will define, in large part, what the nature of St. Thomas's thought is for them. If Pico della Mirandola was right when he claimed that "sine Thoma Aristoteles mutus csset ", is the reverse true too? Or is it rather that St. Thomas is able to speak because he listened to the text of Exodus 3 :14, "I am Who am"? This article cannot, of course, provide a definitive answer to so important and complicated a question, but my hope is that it may prove helpful in providing such an answer. The ques­ tion that it docs aim to answer is a historical one, and, simply put, it is this: did St. Thomas attribute a doctrine of creation to Aristotle? The phrasing of the question is important here, for I am not concerned with whether Aristotle himself held a doctrine of creation . That can he left to Aristotelian scholars, who likely arc as divided on it as Thomists are on the role of Aristotle in St. Thomas's thought. My concern here, rather, is whether St. Thomas thought Aristotle had a doctrine of crea­ tion, for if he did, then he would likely allow Aristotle a large

A standard reading of Aristotle in St. Thomas's time was that found in Peter I,ombard's Senlent1'.ae in iv libros dis tinctae, more commonly known as the Libri sententiarum, and the success of this work guaranteed that all the masters who produced scripta on this textbook of medieval theology would have to takes sides on whether Aristotle had a doctrine of crea tion. The locus for discussions on this question, of course, is Book 2, distinction 1, and, as we will see shortly, St. Thomas shows no hesitation in taking a side.
In the first chapter of distinction 1, I.ombard begins his dis cussion of creation by citing Genesis 1 :1, "In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram ".4 As Lombard sees it, Moses is here reporting that the world was made by God the creator in one beginning (in uno principio a Deo creatore mundum factum), and he sees the text £rom Genesis as destroying the opinions of those who held that there were many principles without their own principles (plura sine principio fuisse p1-i:ncipia). Citing from the Glossa of Strabo,5 IA>mbard gives Plato and Aristotle as examples, both of whom he considers to be among those who did not teach that the world depended on God as its one prin ciple. Lombard deals with Plato first: 4 Peter Lombard, Sententiae m iv libros distinctae, lib. 2, dist. 1, cap. For Plato tho ug ht that there we re th ree pr inc ip les, namely Go d, th e ex em plar, and matt er : the latter uncreated, wi tho ut be ginin g, an d Go d as a cr aftsm an, and no t as a cr eato r.6 Lombard next deals with Aristotle, and he too does not accord with the teaching of Moses.
Bu t Ar istot le asser te d two pr inciple s, nam ely matter and fo rm (spe ciem), and a thir d, calle d "o per ator ium " ; he also said that the worl d al ways is, and alw ays was.7 No doubt Aristotle's well-known doctrine of the eternity of the world helped establish the view that he denied the creation of things that is professed by Christians, but when the youthful St. Thomas approached these texts of Lombard he came pre pared to distinguish the fact of creation from question of the eternity of the world, a distinction he made for the entirety of his career.8 1. In II Sententiarum, d. 1, expositio textus (1253).
The first text of St. Thomas that we will examine, as it hap pens, is his expositio textus on this very passage of Lombard, and it is, in all likelihood, St. Thomas's first written judge� ment on whether, for him, Aristotle had a doctrine of creation. For Plato thought that there were three principles: No te that in this Pl ato erred, because he po sited that ther e ar e ex em plar fo rm s subsis t in g pe r se outsi de of the di vi n e intellect, and that neither these fo rm s no r matter has bei ng fr om Go d.9 St. Thomas has no disagreement here with Lombard's claims Furthermor e, Aristotle po sits no t only an ac ti ve ex em plar cause, whi ch is unders too d by the pr incipl e "op er atori um ", but also a f i nal cause.
(3) Fu r thermor e, accor di ng to [Ari stotl e] , the fo rm and the ag ent and the end all co incide in the same thi ng , as he says in Book 2 of th e Physics, and so he seem s to have po sited only two pr incip les. 10 This variety of possible inter p retations of Aristotle requires St. Thomas to answer each in turn, but before he does so, he gives his general determinatio to this question. incidere cum agente, sed in iclem specie vel similitudi11e." St.
Thomas continues: From this it follows that there is one first principle outside of a thing, which is the agent and the exemplar and the end, and two [principles] that are parts of a thing, namely form and matter, which are produced by that first principle.14 As St. Thomas sees it, Aristotle's first principle produces the matter and the form of things, and it is the one upon which the being of all things depend: "Aristoteles non erravit in ponendo plura principia, quia posuit esse omnium tantum a primo principio dependere." St. Thomas reiterates this claim in our next text, which is an article found in this same dis tinction of Book 2 of the Sentences.
Lombard's brief analysis of creation, and of things pertain ing to creation, provided the occasion fo r much discussion on these matters, and our next text is found in a question devoted to what surely was one of the hottest topics in St. Thomas's day: the eternity of the world. This fact is attested to by the sheer number of preliminary difficulties (i.e. fourteen), and by the number of arguments sea contra (i.e. nine). The topic and its many difficulties were taken very seriously by St. Thomas, for we find him responding to all twenty-three arguments made in the course of this article. The first set of arguments argue for the eternity of the world, and after they have had their say, they are confronted by the first argument sea contra.
On the contrary, God is either the cause of the substance of the world, or not, but of its motion alone. If of its motion only, then its substance is uncreated; therefore it is a first principle, and thus there will be many first principles and many things uncreated, which was disproved 14 are of finite power, because they ar e a body, they require some agent of infinite power, from which they have both perpetuity of motion and perpetuity of being, just as they have motion and being [from it]. It does not, however, follow from this that God should precede the heavens in duration, because he is not giving being through motion, but through eternal influence, insofar as his knowledge is the cause of things. And from the fact that he knows from all eternity and wills, it follows that things are from all eternity, just as from the fact that the sun is from all eternity it follows that its ray is from all eternity.17 While this text occurs in the context of a discussion of the dura tion of the world, our concern is St. Thomas's attribution to Aristotle of a God who gives esse to the heavens, and not just bishop that the first six articles of faith concern God, and deal with three aspects of divinity: the divine unity, the Trinity of Persons, and the effects of divine powe r. Our text is found among a list of errors concerning the latter.
St. Thomas lists six errors concerning the effects of divine power to the extent that they concern "the creation of things in the being of nature " : pertinet ad creationem rerum in esse naturae.  Another error was th at of Aristotle who posited indeed that all things were produced by God, but eternally, and that there was no beginning of time, whereas it is written in Genesis 1 "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" ; and to exclude such an error the decretal adds " from the beginning of time. " 2 7 The meaning of this tecxt seems clear to me: Aristotle's error, as St. Thomas sees it here, was not that he denied that the very being of things depended upon God, hut was rather that he held that such a dependence was eternal. species is contracted to a determinate mode of being by an ac cident tliat attaches to it (accidens ei advcniens) , as when man is contracted ( contrahitur) by being white. We are being told, then, that the considerations provided thus far deal with spe cific modes of being, and not with being as such. St. Thomas continues: Each therefore eonsidered being under a certain partieular considera tion, either insofar as it is this being, or insofar as it is such and such a being. And so they assign ed particular agent causes to things.31 To whom does " each " ( utrique) refer here� If we ask E. Gil son this question, he responds that St. Thomas is referring to Plato and to Aristotle, and having done that, Gilson reads the entire article as a denial on St. Thomas's part that Aristotle had a doctrine of creation. Indeed, he uses his interpretation of this article to read the text from the De potentia just dealt with, and so, when St. Thomas says there that Aristotle and Plato came to consider ipsum esse universale, he didn't mean ipswn csse universalc at all, he rather meant ipsurn csse sub stanliale. 3 2 But this presents problems.
To begin with, Gilson seems guilty of an error in his trans lation of the Latin text. The Latin singular pronoun uterque is used to refer to two individuals separately, and employs a singular verb; ambo refers to two things collectively, and em ploys a plural verb. If St. Thomas had wanted to refer to Plato and Aristotle here, he would have had to write "u terque ... consideravit .. . " What emerges is that the utrique refers not to two individuals taken separately, hut to two groups taken separately, and the shift from individuals to groups, from the singular uterque to the plural utrique explains why the verb a1 "Utrique igitur consideraverunt ens particulari sub quadMU con sideratione, vel inquantum est hoc ens, vel inquantum est tale ens. Et sic rebus causas agentes particulares assignaverunt." Summa theologiae, I, q. 44, a. 2, in corp., ed. cit., 28la8-12.
s2 Cf. q. 3, a. 5, in corp .) ; and then, in the first part of the Summa theologiae, totle is a fair question, but that he did so seems to me beyond dispute.