Summary and Conclusion

Abstract

In a lucid page, M. Fakhry has underscored the basic opposition between Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism: the dualistic tendency of the theory of potency and act, on the one hand, and the monistic tendency of Neo-Platonic emanationism, on the other hand.¹ His concluding remarks are:

I content myself here with noting the great difficulty to the vindication of creation ex nihilo which the Aristotelian distinction between Act and Potency raises. The notion of Act in Aristotle is dictated by the requirements of a dualist metaphysics and has meaning only in contradistinction to Potency. Aristotle is, therefore, perfectly consistent with himself when he carries this dualism to the extreme and sets Act and Potency, God and Matter up against each other, as two co-eternal principles. Creationism, on the other hand, can be rationally vindicated only in terms of a monistic metaphysics in which the initial distinction between Act and Potency does not as much as arise. How the Thomist doctrine of creation ex nihilo can be fitted into a metaphysics of Act-Potency is very difficult to see. A deeper reading of Aquinas would show that his doctrine of creation is of Neo-Platonic (notably Dionysian) extraction; an emanationist monism whose philosophical scaffolding is Aristotelian, and from which the determinist “sting” has been artfully removed. In fact, Aquinas speaks of creation as a process of “emanation” of things from the First Principle in the S. Theol., I, 45.²