Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics

Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics by St. Thomas Aquinas

It turns out that Metaphysics is theology.

Aristotle is hard to read. Aquinas is hard to read. Aquinas's explanation of Metaphysics is surprisingly readable. This is particularly true compared to the Metaphysics, which comes often comes across as the cryptic notes I take during trials where a word captures a thought. For me, at least. Anyone else would be baffled. Aristotle often makes his point by stringing together three seemingly unrelated words, e.g., head, fish, and building, as examples.

Another thing about reading Aristotle is that he had a huge body of work that is interdependent. Aristotle assumes that you've read everything he's written so you will recognize that the essential lynchpin to his argument is found in the Physics or De Anima. Of course, if you haven't, it will seem “like Greek” to you.

Aquinas has the virtue of having read Aristotle's corpus, and so he shares the essential insights from other texts that connect confusingly cryptic thoughts. He also explains what the examples are examples of.

I wouldn't try to read the Metaphysics by itself. The reader needs a guide and Aquinas is a good guide.

That said, I assume that the reader has to be on guard about some of the ideas that Aquinas smuggles into his reading of Aristotle. There are occasions where Aquinas flat out disagrees with Aristotle, such as Aristotle's view that some causes are purely a matter of luck or chance. That is a non-starter for Aquinas, for whom everything is within God's providential control.

The metaphysics starts with a granular look at “ousia” or “substance” with respect to the sensible world. The reader gets a review of the pre-Socratic philosophers of elements, none of which are satisfying since they seem to reduce everything to one undifferentiated type of thing, which does not seem right. Platonic forms, on the other hand, lack causality with respect to things in the world.

Aristotle solves the problem by introducing matter into the equation. Everything can be boiled down into Form, the privation of form, and matter, which is the object on which form and privation work. Form, privation, and matter introduce the notion of “actuality” and “potentiality.” Forms are actual; privations are deprivations of the actual; matter is the potentiality for forms and privations. Aristotle is certain that this three-fold arrangement provides a better explanation than his competitors for questions about why things corrupt and are generated.

Then, at the end, with startling suddenness, we are - in Aquinas' view - dealing with theology. The hints were there all along. Aristotle did tell us that everything we read prior to Book XII was the lesser part of the subject and that the dominant part would define the “science” of Metaphysics. Thus, there are three kinds of substances - movable (i.e., changeable/corruptible) sensible things, eternal sensible things, and eternal immaterial things. The first are things like birds and squids; the second are the visible stars; the third are necessary things we can't sense, i.e., God and divinities.

Where does this breakdown come from? I don't know. Maybe from “On the Heavens”? Maybe from “De Anima”? This is the kind of thing that makes Aristotle frustrating.

Aristotle certainly views the eternal insensible as necessary. Any system without them lacks a starting point and is subjected to the self-refutation of eternal regression. So, the eternal insensible are necessary as the “unmoved movers.” They start the motion of things and keep the motion in play.

Aristotle seems to refer to the unmoved movers as God, at least the unique first Unmoved Mover (“UM”) that moves the first heaven - that which holds the stars or at least coordinates the order of the universe as a whole. This UM (all UMs in fact) must be without matter because matter corrupts, and nothing eternal can be allowed to corrupt. Matter is also potential, and nothing eternal can have potential because potential includes the potential not to be.

Turn the switch of being off, and what will turn it back on?

So, the UM is pure actuality without potential, which makes it perfect and, therefore, good.

But what is it - the answer seems to be that its substance is “intelligible.” The UM is thought thinking itself. For Aristotle, there is nothing better than active thinking, and there is nothing better to think about than perfection itself.

It was not clear to me why God had to be thought. The answer might be found in De Anima.

At least, this is my sense of where we ended up. There was a lot in the Metaphysics that was incredibly obscure. I left a lot on the “reading room floor” since I didn't understand it and couldn't fit it into what I thought I understood. There were passages that read like Gnostic mumbo-jumbo.

I read Metaphysics for the Online Great Books reading program. I happened to be reading James Dolezal “All that is God” where Dolezal, a Calvinist theologian, critiques modern, liberal Calvinist theologians for undermining or rejecting doctrines like the “simplicity of God.” What was interesting in reading Dolezal in the context of Metaphysics was seeing the seeds of “divine simplicity” in Metaphysics. The UM is “simple” because it lacks matter and therefore lacks parts and potential. This is the way it must be, according to Aristotle (as read through the Angelic Doctor), and here we are, 2,500 years later, still dealing with the issue.

My recommendation is that if you really are going to read Metaphysics, you should get a group, find a leader, and tackle it week by week. It is a tough slog to an uncertain outcome.

You need reinforcements for that kind of trip.