Contingency of the created Being I Aristotle’s metaphysics of Being always remained into the substance. In cosmology, Christian philosophers were indebted to Aristotle; but in natural theology, they maintained a strictly theological order and intention. The radical innovation of Christian metaphysics was to consider God as the First. Christian Revelation proposed the believer a faith in a Creator God. This faith led to identify God as the absolute and subsistent Being, Being in essence, the First. For the believer, convinced that the world was created by God out of nothing, the horizon of understanding has radically changed: God is the First. 

St. Thomas, like Aristotle, speaks about the act; not the act of the form, of nature, of substance, but the act of Being or existence. Movement will no longer mean only local or substantial movement, but radical contingency of the existence itself. The first principle – Plato, Aristotle – explains why the universe is what it is, but it does not explain why it is. But now, if God is the absolute Being, everything that it is not God owes its existence to Him. The multiplicity of both the appearances of Plato and the corruptible beings of Aristotle is nothing compared with the radical Christian contingency in the order of existence itself. Apparently, there is nothing as Greek as the first thomist way: First Mover, movements and movers, moved movers, but in the Greek universe everything is already given, the Being of movement flees from the causality of its First Mover. In St. Thomas everything is different since, even if his argument repeats the same physical structure, it strives to prove in the order of Being. Aristotle’s causality is above a world which does not owe its existence to it; it is a starting point, beginning of movement, but not its creator. 

But now, the Christian God which loves and not only attracts, orders or moves the world, is also creator of it. Aquinas seems to repeat Aristotle, but he does so in a completely new direction, since Greeks did not go beyond the event and only explained the cause of the exercise of causality. Now, we get to the causality of Being and the order of existence itself. Being a metaphysical thought that consistently assumes the consequences of faith is the innovation of Christian philosophy. And the first consequence was that science of Being became science of the first cause, since God is First Cause and Being par excellence. This affirmation about God was not in opposition to Greek philosophy; it does not seem to be a conflict between the Greek principles and the conclusions that Christians drew from them. It would be appropriate to say that there was religious novelty without philosophical opposition, so that Greeks did not know a few consequences already implicit in their own principles. 

The distinction of St. Thomas had accumulated many precedents. Boethius had already distinguished esse from quod est, ie what an entity is and the fact that it is. Thus we can distinguish between asking ourselves what is an entity (quid sit) and asking if an entity is or is not (an sit). It is not the same defining what a cat is than affirming that a cat is. Avicenna in turn distinguished the Creator – as necessary being (necesse esse) – from the creatures (possibilia esse et non esse). And it was finally William of Auvergne who first made the distinction between essence and existence. Aquinas, following Avicenna, states that “in the creature, the essence of a thing and its Being are not the same” and understands this as a case - unpredicted by Aristotle – of potency and act. This distinction makes sense of the participation by which creatures are part of God’s Being and definitely determines God’s Transcendence as first Principle. 

The foundation of the divine being as essential Being leads the act-potency composition to a field that was not predicted by Aristotelian philisophy. But it would be equally permissible to say that setting the highest perfection of Being in God – and participated in creatures – would be a Platonic version of the Thomistic distinction. So we can speak about an Aristotelian or Platonic version of the novelty that Aquinas exposed, as long as we observe that Aristotelism and Platonism are, in this case, nothing but known grammars which expressed a metaphysically new element that, additionally, overcame the genuinely Greek horizon of comprenhension. 

Aquinas did not develop the real distinction between essence and act of being, at least, not in a direct way but always referring to it in terms of simplicity of the Divine Being and composition of the created entity. Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. 

Christian Revelation on creation originally enlighted the substantial principles or the relation between formality and actuality, reaching conclusions which shed light on both anthropology and noetics. But they also revolutionized causality as expression of the dynamism of Being. Cause “is said in many ways” since causes are not only causes of their effects but also causes between them. For the sun, which is the active element, the first is to illuminate; in contrast, for air, which is te passive element, the first is to come out from the darkness. 

Even if both things are simultaneously verified, the formal cause gives Being to the matter, but this can also be called cause since it receives and limits Being, so that we have a mutual or reciprocal causality. The essence of the seed constantly reorganizes and shapes the material components that actually constitute it, so that when the seed develops its genetic code becomes formal cause of the tree. But we can also say that this process would be impossible without some organically prepared material elements which receive and make possible this growth, so that these material elements are also cause of the tree, although from another point of view. 

We see then how matter and form, the material and formal causes are causal actions mutually related, just as we saw with the material structuration and the formal dynamism of the substance. The same happens between the efficient and the final causes, since both are cause of the action of the agent, but again from different points of view. The meaning of these analogies is non other than linking the passage of time with Being. First it is the form and then the matter, since matter is only understood by the form. On the other hand, the movement is said of the end and then of the efficient cause, since end is the cause by which agent moves. 

The final cause causes the causality of the efficient cause, but not its entity. The text clearly shows that health is the aim – finality - of the task of the doctor, but it does not make the doctor being doctor, if anything, it makes the doctor to act. On the other hand, the efficient cause causes the entity of the aim, but not of its causality. The doctor achieves health, that is to say, makes health being act, but he does not decide our aim for health. In other words, the efficient cause does not make the aim being aim. In Christian metaphysics, Aristotle’s categorical causality is just the way to express an ontological communication previous to any causal sweeping. In this ontological communication, the relation between the created and the Uncreated is expressed in different ways, depending upon the understanding of it as Foundation, cause and aim. Christian philosophy emphasizes the dynamism of the act of being in front of the abstract essence that is static. 

The first thing that Being makes to its own essence is instantly establishing it as entity, but then Being starts to address its own essence towards its own perfection which is the finality - aim. Essence is in the beginning, but not as an already finished thing, since every essence is actually the progress towards the aim, in the sense that the actual perfection of essences is the final cause of the existences, and achieving it requires many operations. 

It is then not surprising the failure of the attempt to reduce causality to an analytical, mathematical or formal relation, since an existential efficiency will never arise from a deductible – in the case of Hume – or categorical – in the case of Kant – essence.

Being is a fountain which flows effects, and while the relationship between these effects and their causes is unintelligible in a world of abstract essences, it becomes perfectly intelligible in a world in which Being is dynamic. Such existential dynamism of the entity was a radical transformation of Aristotle’s formal dynamism. 

The dynamism of the form was overcomed by the dynamism of being, so that each individual receives its own being. Individuals are still determined by forms, but not as automatic realizations of them since formal causality is subordinated to the existential efficient causality. 

The ontological communication There is a mediation between God and the world, constituted by the operation that metaphysically becomes the very identity of the entity. The unity of the original ontological communication can not be isolated as an absolute moment in the unity of a formal concept because it expresses a result and is actually a unity of tension movement in which the three main ways of ontological expansion are identified: efficiency, formality and finality – aim. 

Considering the entity in a previous moment to this original ontologic communication is considering it in a potentiality state that does not exist, since the intelligibility of the entity is its actuality of being. act of Being is energetic and expresses movement, a transcendental movement, a movement that affects the entity in its reason of being and refers it to the Transcendental God – as its ultimate foundation. This act is consitutively original even if it is not self-sufficient. Its presence is operant and its persistence is an active self-positioning. 

The three causal lines of efficiency, exemplarity and finality are the three basic lines of the ontological communication of Being, and Being can not be ascribed with priority to any of these causal lines. 

The appearance of dualities that, in the recent history of philosophy, represented both the existentialist and essentialist versions can be explained by the neglect of this original unity which can only be mantained by the principle of reciprocity of causes. Instead of an eminencial contingency of the origin in a single causality, the effusion of the act of Being – implied in creation – represents the ontological communication in its original identity, as dynamism of Being in the act and immanence of the end in the beginning. 

Creation itself is an induced dynamism or a response to a vocation . The transcendental anthropology coming from this primordial ontological unity will have a strong interpersonal character. Intelligence is inserted into a deeper dynamism that comes from the ontic roots of man, who is only satisfied in the act of loving contemplation of God . 

Creation meant the distinction between the Non-Created and its complete dependance on it. Existential Christian metaphysics studied the radical contingency of reality. Going from the ancient greek substantialism to existential metaphysics meant the alteration of several important notions: science of Being opens to the rational access to God, for God is the first Cause of being. 

Corruptibility as the main essential feature of substances gives way to other – more radical - metaphysical compositions, while the distinction between the notions of act and form allow to avoid any kind of formalism. To take account of the intelligibility of beings, i. e. to give sufficient reason of their existence, theodicy was developed as part of a metaphysics that studies God as universal cause of being. 

The elaboration of the proofs of the existence of God came a long way, which was that of Christian philosophy. On one hand, the Platonic current penetrated the whole Patristic and informed all Platonic scholastics with Boethius, St. Anselm, Abelardo, Hugh of Saint Victor, Richard of Saint Victor, Peter Lombard and Alexander of Hales; on the other hand, the Aristotelian current enjoyed new vitality due to the islamic speculations of Avicenna, Al-Ghazali and Averroes. 

The XIIIth century represents a haven of peace in which St. Thomas gets the proofs of the existence of God to enter definitively into the history of philosophy. Theologic agnosticism has always highlighted the impossibility of demonstrating the existence of God. 

We can point out three main statements of agnosticism: the first one comes from positivism, and consists in refusing God as object of science, for any thing can transcend the order of the phenomena (Locke). 

The second one denies the idea that a superior cognitive function - different from the pure sensation - exists in the human intellectual activity itself (Hume). Finally, the third one denies the possibility of the rational access to God due the impossibility of a noetic relation between God and human understanding (Kant). Kant, in his “Critique of pure reason”, relegates existence to a cathegory of Modality. 

Existence is a pure concept of understanding, logically derived from the second class of modal knowledges. Some pure principles of our understanding – which establish a priori as many truths for the objects of knowledge - derive from the application of cathegories to intuitions. 

These are the axioms of intuition, the anticipations of perception, the analogies of experience and the postulates of empirical reasoning. 

The postulate of reality states that objects are real – existing – when they coincide with the material conditions of any objectivity, i.e., when they can be perceived by empiric intuition. 

Perceptibility will account for the existence. We can’t assert, in any way, the real existence of those things unrelated to perceptibility. Knowledge can’t know the existence of God because God is not capable of experiment. We also can’t use the intuitive mode of reason – neither on its real use nor on its logical use – since intuition is always sensible. 

These three statements of agnosticism that we have just discussed arise from nominalism. The contingent composition of created beings expresses an internal tension that nominalism loses when it states that only the concrete individual can be object of science. If intuition is restricted to perception - to the sensible order – then theodicy is invalidated as science. It is of primary importance keeping the value of the formal abstraction of human intelligence, without which founding the metaphysical scope of the notion of being and the principle of causality would be impossible. Nominalism meant a disaster from the moment it restricted science to the order of those individuals known by intuition, as if existence and formal abstraction were contradictory.

But such contradiction doesn’t exist, since formal abstraction doesn’t unexistentialize what it abstracts; it is in the formal abstraction where the genuine common entity opens to us. This being is a created being, the being of an effect. The demonstration of the existence of God starts from limited beings, since wherever we find structuration we’ll also find diverse elements, and these elements can only become one by an extrinsic principle. 

One of the main pillars of this demonstration comes from the idea that every composition needs a cause. As St. Thomas states: “Every compound has a cause, since it is diverse by its very nature, and only forms a whole under the cause that unifies it. But God, as we have seen, has no cause, for God is the first efficient cause”. In the process of the rational affirmation of God – and once we accept the starting point of the particular structured entity and the validity of the formal abstraction of intelligence - there is also a need to ensure the metaphysical value of the efficient cause, specially since causality is not directly perceived by sensibility but by intelligence. 

Causality could be expressed by stating that every being which is not its existence – but has existence – demands a cause. In the noetic basis of the process of demonstration of God, the concept of own cause is of great importance, i.e., that cause that can produce the effect by itself and immediately. The demonstrative process of God as the own Cause of the being of finite entities would be invalidated if the number of causes was infinite. Hence, the analysis of the invalidity of the process towards infinite is central to every way to access God. 

This process to infinite– in a number of eficient causes, essentialy subordinated in being or acting – is impossible by itself. In other words, a number of causes where we only find means is impossible, for it would imply the lack of sufficient cause. The attempt of a rational access to God as First Cause is as ancient as philosophy itself. Already in pre-socratics we find enough philosofical orientations in reference to the existence of God, specially in relation to the physical evidence; in the metaphysical arguments of the Eleatics and also in the moral of the Pythagorans. 

But, doubtless, Plato and Aristotle were the ones who redirected the theological thought to vigorous and diverse routes; while the platonic way acquires axiological hints, the aristotelian is purely entitative. Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type.