The Implicate Order of Being according to Saint Thomas Aquinas
Based on a talk given June 7, 2024, at the Sacra Doctrina Conference, The St. Paul Seminary, St. Paul MN, USA
Paul S. Julienne[1]
Abstract: The paper gives an account of essential features of the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas that are needed in order to give a nonreductive understanding of the modern sciences with respect to both their content and their practice. The added value that this paper brings to the matter is that it represents the view of a professional scientist instead of a professional philosopher or theologian (there are innumerable papers on the subject by philosophers or theologians). My viewpoint is that of a retired physicist with a career in theoretical atomic, molecular and optical physics. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences and additionally have some background in philosophy. Since retirement over ten years ago, I have been taking graduate classes in philosophy and metaphysics at the John Paul II Institute in Washington, DC, learning from teachers such as Michael Hanby and David C. Schindler and reading from original sources. I have also participated during the past three years in a once monthly online Thomas Circle meeting of international scholars interested in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. In the latter context, I led a six-month study on the relation of St. Thomas’s metaphysics to the contemporary sciences, on which this paper is based.
The argument of the paper centers around two main themes: (1) the need to see reality according to the whole (“kath’ holon,” to pick up on a theme of D. C. Schindler’s book, The Catholicity of Reason) in order to provide a nonreductive metaphysics to the contemporary sciences and (2) the prominence of the notion of creation ex nihilo as a background to the entirety of St. Thomas’s philosophy of being (following Thomist Josef Pieper). Creation ex nihilo with its radical difference between the uncaused being of God and the participated caused being of creatures can be interpreted according to the notion of an implicate order from physicist David Bohm. An implicate order gives priority to the whole within which parts only make sense in relation to one another within the ordering whole. The paper considers the formal character of being and the implicate order of the true, requiring analogical language and a distinction between the primary causation of God and the secondary causation of creatures. Form, manifesting the exemplar causation of God made present in the hylomorphic nature of material created things comes to be immaterial noetic form in the human mind through the powers of the intellectual soul and thus can be articulated in human speech. This conforms to the patristic theme of exitus-reditus, as powerfully envisioned by Thomist Charles De Koninck. The concluding section on the implicate order of the good points out that the formality and finality of being require a transcending order in which these are implicate in order that form and finality can be intelligible within the immanent order of created being. Thomistic metaphysics offers a nonreductive path for the sciences, making sense of the wondrous intelligibility of being and showing the need to integrate the orders of the true and the good, thus correcting the separation of fact and value in modern thought and encouraging the seeking of wisdom in the practice of science and technology.
A pdf version of the paper is available at my Dropbox link.
[1] Emeritus Fellow, Joint Quantum Institute of NIST and the University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 USA, psj@umd.edu
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