During my very naive reading and notes from class on Aquinas’s “On Being and Essence” something has stuck with me and has left me with an awe and a sort of sadness. It is this understanding that his chain of being from prime matter to God is no longer something that can be applied alone to what is in the world. In Aquinas, there is the ‘beautiful’ if I may view of Man being at the height of the physical world where his intellect reaches beyond the physics even though his form is in not without matter. This human composite sits at this middle point where he is the most complex thing that exists. This is contrasted with God who is pure act and prime matter which is pure potency. As a compost, there is unending restlessness between his unified rational and irrational nature. This ‘fight’ forms the basis for the philosophy of that time, the time before, and for a while after.
As class periods have gone by both in Metaphysics and 19&20th, this thought that there is no way anyone can return to the same thought process as Aquinas and fully understand how he came to this end has humbled me. The idea that it is impossible to see the world through his without taking into account the knowledge modern science, my experience, and many other biases has greatly decreased whatever little confidence I had in this faulty belief. This semester in particular, I have in a sense lost this mentality of seeking out the perfect circles. Philosophy is always morphing into something new, the idea of a single ‘T’ruth out there to be followed and obeyed is not longer as appealing or as realistic, if I may, as it once was. This view I once held or this goal I desired to achieve, much like Aquinas’s perfect world of angels marching in circles around God with man in the center of this great divide, has died.
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