0'7^0
Jacques Marttain, K ce many another Catholic
writer today, is a convert. While attending the Sor­
bonne around the turn of the century, he met his
future wife Raïssa, and together they made the
journey from fin de siècle rationalism to the Church.
At the suggestion of Charles Péguy, they began
attending the lectures of Henri Bergson. From him
they gained an insight into the inadequacy of posi­
tivism, though in other respects Bergsonian intuitionism failed to satisfy them. But soon after their
marriage in 1904 they met the dynamic Leon Bloy,
who probably had the deepest influence on their
thought and ultimately led them to Catholicism.
Since then Maritain has lived the life of a scholar,
teaching, writing, lecturing—and becoming the
world’s most famous Catholic philosopher. He re­
ceived a tribute rare to one in his walk of life when
the French Government named him ambassador to
the Vatican in 1945. In recent years he has been at­
tached to Princeton University, where he is now
Professor Emeritus.
The range of Maritain’s thought is seen in the
subjects he has written about; logic, ethics, the phi­
losophy of science, epistemology, aesthetics, mysti­
cism, political philosophy, and metaphysics. A se­
lection of his more important works includes Art
and Scholasticism, True Humanism; Science and
Wisdom; The Degrees of Knowledge; Man and the
State, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry and An
ntroduction to Philosophy.
The present volume, described by Commonweal
as “profound and exhaustive,” has already taken its
place among his major works—and among the major
writings on the vital problem of existentialism.

W. Ange? Abbey Library
St. Benedict, Oregon 97373

EXISTENCE
AND THE
EXISTENT
Jacques Mari tain

English Version by
Lewis Galantiere and
Gerald B. Phelan

IKt Angel Abbey library
St. Benedict, Oregon 97373

IMAGE BOOKS

A Division of
Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York

IV ^4"
n

Image Books edition 1956
by special arrangement with Pantheon Books, Inc.
PRINTING HISTORY

Pantheon Books, Inc. edition published November 1948
1st printing ............................ November 1948
2nd printing ......................................July 1949

Image Books edition published February 1957

Original French title:
Court Traite de I’Existence et de l’Existant
Copyright 1948 by Pantheon Books, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

COVER BY RONALD CLYNE

TYPOGRAPHY BY EDWARD G0REY

To Raïssa

CONTENTS

Introduction

11

I.

Being

20

ÏI.

Action

56

III.

The Existent

70

IV.

The Free Existent and

the Free EternalPurposes
V.

Ecce in Pace

92
129

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

I

I

INTRODUCTION

Varieties of “Existentialisms”
1. This brief treatise on existence and the existent
may be described as an essay on the existentialism
of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is important to obviate
from the beginning any risk of confusion on this
point. The ‘existentialism’ of St. Thomas is utterly
different from that of the ‘existentialist’ philosophies
propounded nowadays. If I say that it is, in my opin­
ion, the only authentic existentialism, the reason is
not that I am concerned to rejuvenate’ Thomism, so
to speak, with the aid of a verbal artifice which I
should be ashamed to employ, by attempting to trick
out Thomas Aquinas in a costume fashionable to our
day. ( The word ‘costume,’ in this connection, would
certainly be a euphemism. ) I am not a neo-Thomist.
All in all, I would rather be a paleo-Thomist than
a neo-Thomist. I am, or at least I hope I am, a
Thomist. For more than thirty years I have remarked
how difficult it is to persuade our contemporaries not
to confuse the philosopher’s faculty of invention with
the ingenuity that inspires the art of the dress de­
signer.
A Thomist who speaks of St. Thomas’s existential­

12

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

ism is merely reclaiming his own, recapturing from
present-day fashion an article whose worth that
fashion itself is unaware of; he is asserting a prior
right. I shall add, for the sake of greater precision,
that in my view, what distinguishes authentic Thomism from the many non-Thomist, or allegedly Thomist currents in Scholasticism, into which the spirit
of Plato, Descartes, or Wolff has insinuated itself ( a
spirit of which the so-called Thomism taught to-day
has not yet been completely purged), is precisely
the primacy which authentic Thomism accords to
existence and to the intuition of existential being. It
would be an excellent thing if, as a result of the stim­
ulus given by the contemporary systems of existen­
tialism, attention was unmistakably directed to this
point. Even before these systems appeared, I had
already repeatedly pointed out the error of conceiv­
ing the philosophy of being as a philosophy of es­
sences or as a dialectic of essences (what I call
thumbing through a picture-book) instead of seeing
that philosophy for what it really is, what constitutes
its peculiar advantage over all other philosophies
and gives it its unique and eminent place among
them, namely, the fact that it is the philosophy of
existence and of existential realism, the confronta­
tion of the act of existing by an intelligence deter­
mined never to disown itself.
As to vocabulary, it is commonly known that it is
chiefly owing to the influence of Kierkegaard that
the word ‘existential’ has become part of current
speech, particularly in Germany. Twenty years ago
there was a good deal of talk about existential Chris­
tianity, and I remember an eloquent lecture in which
Romano Guardini explained to a number of slightly
bewildered prelates that the existential meaning of

INTRODUCTION

13

the Gospel of St. John had been revealed to him by
the character of Prince Muyshldn in Dostoevski’s
Idiot. Many philosophers, from Jaspers and Gabriel
Marcel to Berdyaeff and Chestov, were already call­
ing themselves ‘existential’ philosophers. It was some
time later that the word ‘existentialism’ passed into
common usage, and with such success indeed that
to-day, as M. Sartre remarked recently, ‘it no longer
signifies anything at all.’ Apart from this incidental
disadvantage, it is in itself a useful, nay an excellent
word. As regards Thomist philosophy, it has this in
common with the word realism, that it is not to be
found in Peter of Bergamo’s index. St. Thomas never
proclaimed himself either an existentialist or a real­
ist—though for that matter he never said he was a
Thomist. The fact remains however that these things
are consubstantial with his thought.

2. Let it be said right off that there are two funda­
mentally different ways of interpreting the word ex­
istentialism. One way is to affirm the primacy of ex­
istence, but as implying and preserving essences or
natures and as manifesting the supreme victory of
the intellect and of intelligibility. This is what I con­
sider to be authentic existentialism. The other way
is to affirm the primacy of existence, but as destroy­
ing or abolishing essences or natures and as mani­
festing the supreme defeat of the intellect and of
intelligibility. This is what I consider to be apocry­
phal existentialism, the current kind which ‘no
longer signifies anything at all.’ I should think so!
For if you abolish essence, or that which esse posits,
by that very act you abolish existence, or esse. Those
two notions are correlative and inseparable. An ex­
istentialism of this sort is self-destroying.

14

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

However rationalistic he may have been, Des­
cartes, in so far as he stemmed from Duns Scotus
and was therefore the ancestor of the modern libertistic metaphysical systems, inclined towards this
sort of existentialism in his view of God. It is quite
true that he spoke endlessly of the divine essence,
to the point of perceiving in it a kind of efficient
cause of the very existence of God. But that essence
became so absolutely impenetrable—except in so far
as the idea of it was by itself sufficient to assure us
of God’s existence—that it was, so to say, no more
than the sudden splendour of the very existence of
God conceived as a pure act of will. Driven to its
conclusion, this would give us a divine Existence de­
void of any nature. And as this notion is unthinkable,
our thought glides on to the more or less ambiguous
substitute provided by the idea of a pure Action, a
pure Efficiency, or Liberty, higher than the whole or­
der of intellect or intelligibility, positing itself with­
out reason, by virtue of its power alone, and arbi­
trarily creating intelligibles and essences as well as
the ideas which portray them in our minds.
This, in the last analysis, is why the God of Des­
cartes is a will entirely free from every order of wis­
dom (a position which St. Thomas looked upon as
blasphemy). This is why such a God excludes from
his action every sort of finality, creates eternal veri­
ties in the guise of pure contingents, which are not
dependent upon his immutable essence (the pos­
sible participations of which his intelligence would
immutably perceive), but upon his mere will. This
is why he would have been able to create moun­
tains without valleys, square circles, and contradic­
tions both of which were equally true. This is why
the entire order of human morality is afflicted ( with

INTRODUCTION

15

respect to him) with the same radical contingency
and is dependent upon a pure decree devoid of rea­
son, the just and the unjust being such only by the
good pleasure of his sovereign existence and by the
unmotivated choice according to which the divine
subject decides to exercise his creative liberty.
It is this same form of existentialism—in which the
primacy of existence is asserted, but paid for by the
abolition of intelligible nature or essence—that we
find again in the atheistic existentialism of to-day;
wherefore the author of L’Etre et le Néant has more
reasons than he realises to hark back to the philos­
opher of the cogito. But this time it is no longer a
matter of the supreme Existence on which an abso­
lutist theism hangs a rationalist vision of the world,
a vision which is all the more imperious for the fact
that it originates in the mere good pleasure of inac­
cessible Infinity. This time it is the finite existence
of subjects devoid of essence whom a primordial
atheistic option flings into the chaos of slimy and dis­
aggregated appearances that make up a radically
irrational world, and whom it summons to make or
create, not of course their essence or their intelligi­
ble structure, since those do not exist, but images
launched into time, projects which fail again and
again to furnish them with something like a counte­
nance. This they are to do by making a succession
of absolute and irrevocable choices which involve
them irretrievably in the face of ever-new given sit­
uations.
An existence without essence, a subject without
essence; from the very beginning we dwell in the
unthinkable. Thereupon—and this absence of fair
play is in my view the blackest stain on the philos-

16

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

ophy in question1—there is substituted for the origi­
nal affirmation, for the frank affirmation that exist­
ence is devoid of essence or excludes essence, the
more elaborate and ambiguous affirmation that ex­
istence (Heidegger dixit) precedes essence. I say
ambiguous, because it could signify something true
( namely that act precedes potency, that my essence
owes to my existence its very presence in the world,
and that it owes its intelligibility to Existence in
pure act), whereas in reality it signifies something
totally different (namely that existence actuates
11 am quite aware that the notion of essence, like every
other notion contained in the lexicon of metaphysics, has
been re-cast in an entirely phenomenological perspective.
Precisely because of this, if we are to call things by their
right names, we are obliged to say that in the phenomeno­
logical existentialism that originates with Heidegger there is
a radical bad faith which consists in appropriating to itself
all the notions that we owe to the great metaphysicians of
being, and which possess meaning only for the realistic in­
tellect whose quest is the extra-mental mystery that sur­
rounds what is. Those notions were appropriated for the
purpose of exploiting them in the universe of phenomeno­
logical thought, the universe of the ‘appearance which is
essence’ (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 12), where, in reality, they
cease to possess meaning, but where, since the aim is to
remain a metaphysician, they will continue to be used and
corrupted in such a way that they may endlessly yield anti­
natural meanings. This sort of transcendental embezzle­
ment could not but end in a tainted metaphysical system:
phenomenology, under its existentialist aspect, is no more
than a scholasticism corrupted at its root. Incidentally, this
is what constitutes its undeniable historic interest. The
metaphysics of being and scholasticism, though it be only
in this corrupt form, is back in the main stream of modem
philosophy, or rather, it makes plain to modern philosophy
that a certain cycle has been completed. We may hence­
forth look forward to the birth of a new cycle in philosophy,
both for good and for ill; and this corrupt scholasticism may
perhaps be manuring the soil for a new germination of au­
thentic metaphysics, at least wherever the earth shall have
been vigorously enough ploughed.

INTRODUCTION

17

nothing, that I exist but I am nothing, that man ex­
ists but there is no human nature).
In the same way, the notion of project’2 is an am­
biguous substitute for the notion of essence or quid­
dity, and that of situation is an ambiguous substi­
tute for the notion of an objective conditioning
resulting from the causes and natures interacting in
the world. And just as, in the recesses of Descartes’
metaphysics, the notions of pure Action, pure Effi­
ciency, or pure Liberty were substituted for the
unthinkable notion of a God without a nature, so
here, for the unthinkable notion of a subject without
a nature there is substituted the notion of pure ac­
tion or pure efficiency as the exercise of an option—
of pure liberty, in short, itself ambiguous and col­
lapsing from within; for although it seems to appeal
to a sovereign free will, it really appeals only to pure
spontaneity, which is inevitably suspected of being
merely the sudden explosion of necessities hidden in
the depths of that nature which was allegedly exor­
cised. It was perhaps to all this that one critic was
alluding when, in that matchless language in which
philosophy nowadays rejoices, he reproached M.
Sartre’s doctrine with being a resurrection of radi­
*
cal-socialism.
Let it be said that this doctrine is far less removed
2 ‘I emerge alone and in anguish in the face of the unique
and first project that constitutes my being’ (L’Etre et le
Néant, p. 77). ‘When I constitute myself as comprehension
of a possible as my possible, I am obliged to recognise its
existence at the terminus of my project, and to grasp it as
myself, yonder, waiting for me in the future, separated
from me by nothingness’ (Ibid., p. 79).
0 French radical-socialism refers to a political party, rep­
resentative of bourgeois liberalism which is neither ‘radical’
nor ‘socialist’ in the English meaning of these terms.—Trans­
lator’s Note.

18

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

than Sartre himself believes from those professors in
France who towards 1880 sought to establish a lay
ethics’3 by abolishing God and falling back upon
bourgeois respectability and the Kantian decalogue.
For if the existentialist thinks that it is very embar­
rassing that God should not exist; if he declares—
thus displaying evidence of metaphysical perspicac­
ity—that there is no human nature because there is
no God to conceive it, and that, God once abolished,
nothing in the world is intelligible; nevertheless, his
point of departure, and the aim of the shrewd energy
that informs his whole undertaking, is to provide this
nauseating human vibrio, which persists in increas­
ing and multiplying, with the means to get along in
a world without God, and to shift for itself under
atheism. ( Not, of course, by retaining bourgeois re­
spectability as a standard, but by finding ways not
to be—to adopt Sartre’s moral categories—a ‘rascal’
and a ‘rotter.’ This is another and doubtless more
economical way, perhaps, of justifying one’s exist­
ence. Neither are these means provided by imitating
Descartes’ God in arbitrarily setting up standards of
justice and injustice and establishing an objective
measure of morality, since no such thing exists, but
in attributing a moral value, and even a heroic value
to any act whatsoever, provided the act was under­
taken in entire liberty. )
Here we have the inviolable arcana, the initial de­
cision and the hygienic bias of existentialism: Man­
age at all costs to make atheism livable. But what
if by chance that could not be managed? What if
by chance a man could not get along, or adapt him­
self? The question does not even arise. It is deliberJ. P. Sartre, L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme, p. 34.

INTRODUCTION

19

ately suppressed and forbidden. M. Sartre is right
in declaring himself firmly optimistic and in leaving
the tragic sense to Christians—to Christians and to
the great anti-Christians. No need even to mention
Pascal; in existentialism there is nothing equal to the
stature of a Nietzsche. This astounding renunciation
of any measure of grandeur is probably the most
original and most highly appreciated contribution
that existentialism has made to our age.

Chapter One

BEING

Veritas sequitur esse rerum

3. Thomas Aquinas, I have remarked in another
essay,1 reaches existence itself through tire operation
of the intellect itself. He has the most exactingly
classical idea of science; he is scrupulously attentive
to the slightest requirements and the most highly re­
fined rules and measures of logic, of reason, and of
the art of putting ideas together. What he knows is
no picture-book, but is that very heaven and earth
in which there are more things than are dreamt of
in all the philosophies. It is that existent universe,
set firmly upon primary facts, which we are required
to discover, not deduce; that universe traversed by
all the influxes productive of being which vivify it,
unify it, cause it to push onward towards the unfore­
seeable future; that universe, also, which is wounded
by all those deficiencies of being that constitute the
reality of evil and in which we must see the price
paid for the interaction of beings, the price paid for
created liberty, capable of evading the influx of the
First Being.
1 J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, 1927,
p. 308-

BEING

21

Veritas sequitur esse rerum is the first Thomist po­
sition of which, in the present connection, we must
note the significance. Tnith-follows-upomthe-existence of things, i.e., of those trans-objective subjects
with which thought stands face to face. Truth is the
adequation of the immanence in act of our thought
with that which exists outside our thought. True
knowledge consists in a spiritual super-existence by
which, in a supreme vital act, I become the other as
such, and which corresponds to the existence exer­
cised or possessed by that other itself in the particu­
lar field of intelligibility which is its peculiar pos­
session.
Thus knowledge is immersed in existence. Exist­
ence—the existence of material realities—is given us
at first by sense; sense attains the object as existing;
that is to say, in the real and existing influence by
which it acts upon our sensorial organs. This is why
the pattern of all true knowledge is the intuition of
the thing that I see, and that sheds its light upon
me.2 Sense attains existence in act without itself
knowing that it is existence. Sense delivers existence
to the intellect; it gives the intellect an intelligible
treasure which sense does not know to be intelligi­
ble, and which the intellect, for its part, knows and
calls by its name, which is being.
The intellect, laying hold of the intelligibles, dis­
engaging them by its own strength from sense ex­
perience, reaches, at the heart of its own inner vital­
ity, those natures or essences which, by abstracting
them, it has detached from their material existence
at a given point in space and time. But to what end?
Merely in order to contemplate the picture of the
2 Cf. Aristotle, On the Heavens, Bk. Ill; St. Thomas
Aquinas, De Veritate, 12, 3, ad 2, and ad 3.

22

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

essences in its ideas? Certainly not! Rather in order
to restore them to existence by the act in which in­
tellection is completed and consummated, I mean
the judgment pronounced in the words ita est, thus
it is. When, for example, I say: ‘In every Euclidean
triangle the sum of the angles is equal to two right
angles,’ or, ‘The earth revolves round the sun,’ what
I am really saying is that every Euclidean triangle
exists in mathematical existence as possessing the
property described; that the earth exists in physical
existence as characterised by the movement de­
scribed. The function of judgment is an existential
function.3

Simple Apprehension
4. Some explanation is necessary concerning, in
the first place, the abstractive perception which is
the first operation of the mind, and, in the second
place, judgment. On the first point we shall remark
that a kind of holy horror comes over the existential­
ist philosophers, whether Christian or atheist, in the
presence of what they call the universe of objects—
a horror which, while on the one hand it entails se­
rious results, to wit, the formal rejection of the con­
ditions of intelligibility of knowledge, is, on the other
3 J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, pp. 309311. When phenomenology elected gratuitously to recast
concepts according to its method, the result, as concerns
the existentialist phenomenologists, was to void the infini­
tive to exist of its natural content. As M. Michel Sora has
rightly observed (Du dialogue intérieur, Paris, 1947, p. 30),
ex-sistere does not mean ‘to stand outside oneself but ‘to
stand outside of one’s causes,’ or ‘outside nothingness,’ to
emerge from the night of non-being, or from that of mere
possibility, or that of potency.

BEING

23

hand, futile in origin, born as it is of a really shabby
misunderstanding that goes far back in time to the
Cartesian theory of idea-pictures.4 They imagine, or
construe the object as a reified idea, as a bit of pure
externality, passive and inert, an obstacle to the
mind, something interposing itself between the mind
and the world of existence, or real subjects. Con­
sequently, they contend that only the actual expe­
rience of subjectivity could reach those subjects.
They do not see that object and objectivity are the
very life and salvation of the intellect. The object
is the term of the first operation of the intellect
(simple perception, or ‘simple apprehension’); what
is it therefore if not, under a given specific aspect
determined and cut out by abstraction, the intelligi­
ble density of an existent subject, rendered trans­
parent in act to the mind and identified with the
mind’s vital activity by and in the concept? Briefly,
the object as present in the mind is the intelligible
objectisation of a trans-objective subject. But this
trans-objective subject is, in its concrete existence,
inexhaustible; therefore it admits of being attained
in an indefinite number of new objects of concept
linked to the preceding ones. Besides they do not
see that this universe of objects which they seek in­
dustriously to drive out of existence does not in fact
claim to exist in itself; it exists only in the mind;
what exists is subjects, or supposita, objectised, in­
deed, in the mind in order to become known, but
4 On the Cartesian theory of idea-pictures see J. Maritain,
Le songe de Descartes, Paris, 1932, pp. 153 ff., Eng. trans.,
N. Y., 1944, pp. 168 ff. I have never identified the Cartesian
idea with a sensible image, as M. Wahl believes. He seri­
ously misunderstands my statement on this point. (Jean
Wahl, Tableau de la philosophie française, Paris, 1947, p.
228.)

24

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

posited for themselves in the world of concrete and
contingent existence where nature and adventure go
hand in hand. I shall come back later to the impor­
tance in Thomist philosophy of this notion of subject
or suppositum. From another and merely logical
point of view I wish only to remark here that for this
philosophy (following a distinction too often neg­
lected) what a science tends to know is a deter­
minate subject in its existential inexhaustibility,
whereas the object of that science consists, in rigor­
ous terms, in the conclusions to which the science
leads.
The Marxists, for their part, are faithful to the no­
tion of objects; but, biased as they are by an inverted
Hegelianism and a dialectical idealism transmuted
into a philosophy of the real, they actually neglect
the universe of existence, or of subjects, and attri­
bute an existence, that in reality is nothing but an
extraposition of the Idea, to a universe of reified ob­
jects and of natures which are mere contingent as­
pects of the immanence of becoming. They thus
leave themselves open to the accusation which the
existentialists level against the idealistic myth of the
object.
We may therefore dismiss them both to argue it
out among themselves, and conclude our first con­
sideration by saying that what the intellect, in ab­
stractive perception (which is the first phase and
condition of all its activity ) lays hold of is not those
eternal things which it would contemplate in some
fanciful separate and intelligible universe, or mirage
of hypostasised grammatical forms, proceeding from
the shoddy Platonism which positivists and nominal­
ists, existentialists and Marxists, consider inseparable
from the notion of essences or natures endowed with

BEING

25

unchangeable, intelligible structures. The metaphy­
sician knows that his task is to search for the ultimate
foundation of the intelligibility of things as of every
other quality or perfection of being. He finds it in
the pure Act, and understands that in the final anal­
ysis there would be no human nature if the divine
Intellect did not perceive its own Essence, and in
that Essence the eternal idea of man, which is not
an abstract and universal idea, as our ideas are, but
a creative idea. What we perceive, however, is not
this divine idea; it is not in this intelligible heaven
that we grasp human nature. The intelligible heaven
in which we grasp and manipulate essences and na­
tures is within ourselves, it is the active immanence
of our immaterial thought. In that path which the
intellect cuts through reality and sense experience
in order to obtain its sustenance, that is to say, in
abstractive perception, what the intellect lays hold
of is the natures or essences which are in existent
things or subjects ( but not in the state of universality
or intelligibility in act), which themselves are not
things, and which the intellect strips of existence by
immaterialising them. These are what, from the very
beginning, we call intelligibles, or objects of thought.

Judgment
5. The second consideration, however, which con­
cerns judgment, is what is chiefly important to us
here. I said a moment ago that the function of judg­
ment was an existential function, and that judgment
restored the essences (the intelligibles, the objects
of thought) to existence or to the world of subjects—
to an existence that is either necessarily material, or

26

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

merely ideal, or (at least possibly) immaterial, ac­
cordingly as we deal with physical, mathematical,
or metaphysical knowledge. Here a central problem
arises, the problem of the philosophical significance
of judgment, and of that existence itself which, ac­
cording to Thomists, it is its function to affirm.
Descartes holds that judgment is an operation of
the will, not of the intellect, and that the existence
which it affirms is merely the positing of the ideatum,
in itself inaccessible, of which the idea is the por­
trait. For Kant, judgment itself possesses an ideal
and nonexistential function; it effects the concept by
subsuming an empirical matter under a category;
and existence is a mere positing absolutely devoid
of all intelligible value or content. In St. Thomas’s
view, in contrast to that of Descartes, judgment is
not only an operation which takes place following
simple apprehension and the formation of the con­
cept; it is the completion, the consummation, the
perfection, and the glory of the intellect and of in­
tellection, just as the existence it affirms is the glory
and perfection of being and of intelligibility.
As I wrote in The Degrees of Knowledge,5 when
I ‘form a judgment,’ I accomplish on my noemata,
within my thought, an operation which has meaning
only because it relates to the fashion in which they
exist (at least possibly) outside my thought. The
function proper to judgment thus consists in trans­
posing the mind from the plane of simple essence, of
the simple object presented to thought, to the plane
of the thing, of the subject possessing existence ( ac­
tually or possibly) and of which the predicate-object
of thought and the subject-object of thought are in5 J. Maritain, Les Degrés du savoir, fourth ed., Paris,
1946, pp. 188-190. Eng. trans., London, 1937, pp. 117-119.

BEING

27

telligible aspects. In a different sense to Last’s, we
may say with him that every judgment supposes an
‘intact harmony’ (on the side of the thing) and a
reconciliation after struggle’ ( effected by the judg­
ment itself). The ‘embrace,’ preceding that ‘state of
severance’ which it is the function of judgment to
vanquish,’ is given in the thing, in the trans-objective subject. Judgment restores to the trans-objective
subject its unity which simple apprehension (laying
hold upon different objects of thought within that
subject) had severed. This unity could not precede
severance in the mind since the mind operates the
other way round, dissolves the unity in order, sub­
sequently, to re-establish it. In existence, outside the
mind, this unity precedes severance (that is, is pos­
ited initially); and existence itself, inasmuch as it is
something had (exercita), lies outside the order of
simple representation or simple apprehension.
What does this mean? ‘Judgment is not content
with the representation or apprehension of exist­
ence. It affirms existence, it projects into it, as ef­
fected or effectible outside the mind, the objects of
concept apprehended by the mind. In other words,
when the intellect judges, it Uves intentionally, by
an act proper to itself, this same act of existing which
the thing exercises or is able to exercise outside the
mind.’8 Existence thus affirmed and intentionally ex­
perienced by and in the mind is the consummation
or completion, in the mind, of intelligibility in act.
It corresponds to the act of existing exercised by
things. And this act of existing is itself incomparably
more than a mere positing without intelligible value
of its own; it is act or energy par excellence; and6
6 Les Degrés du savoir, p. 191, note. Eng. trans., p. 119.

28

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

as we know, the more act there is the greater the
intelligibility.
And yet existence is not an essence. It belongs to
another order, an order which is other than the
whole order of essences. It is therefore not an intel­
ligible nor an object of thought in the sense given
above to these words ( which is synonymous with es­
sence). What are we to conclude if not that exist­
ence goes beyond the object strictly so called, be­
yond the intelligible strictly so called, because it is
an act exercised by a subject, whose eminent intel­
ligibility, we may say super-intelligibility, objectises
itself in us in the very act of judgment? In this sense
we could call it a trans-objective act. It is in a higher
and analogical sense that it is an intelligible. ‘The
intelligibility with which judgment deals is more
mysterious than that which notions or ideas convey
to us; it is not expressed in a concept but in the very
act of affirming or denying. It is the super-intelligi­
bility, if I may put it so, of the act of existing itself,
either possible or actually given. And it is on this
super-intelligibility of existence that St. Thomas
hangs the whole life of the intellect.’7

«
The Intuition of Being

6. This is why, at the root of metaphysical knowl­
edge, St. Thomas places the intellectual intuition of
that mysterious reality disguised under the most
commonplace and commonly used word in the lan­
guage, the word to be; a reality revealed to us as the
7 J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, p. 3x1.

BEING

29

uncircumscribable subject of a science which the
gods begrudge us when we release, in the values
that appertain to it, the act of existing which is ex­
ercised by the humblest thing—that victorious thrust
by which it triumphs over nothingness.
A philosopher is not a philosopher if he is not a
metaphysician. And it is the intuition of being—even
when it is distorted by the error of a system, as in
Plato or Spinoza—that makes the metaphysician. I
mean the intuition of being in its pure and all-per­
vasive properties, in its typical and primordial intel­
ligible density; the intuition of being secundum
quod est ens.8 Being, seen in this light, is neither the
vague being of common sense, nor the particularised
being of the sciences and of the philosophy of na­
ture, nor the de-realised being of logic, nor the
pseudo-being of dialectics mistaken for philosophy.9
It is being disengaged for its own sake, in the values
and resources appertaining to its own intelligibility
and reality; which is to say, in that richness, that
analogical and transcendental amplitude which is
inviscerated in the imperfect and multiple unity of
its concept and which allows it to cover the infini­
tude of its analogates and causes it to overflow or
superabound in transcendental values and in dy­
namic values of propensity through which the idea
of being transgresses itself.10 It is being, attained or
perceived at the summit of an abstractive intellec­
tion, of an eidetic or intensive visualisation which
8 St. Thomas, In Metaph. Arist., IV, 1, (Cathala ed., pp.
530-533).
9 Cf. J. Maritain, Sept Leçons sur l’Etre, Paris, n.d., pp.
35-50, Eng. trans., A Preface to Metaphysics, N. Y., 1939,
PP- 33-42.
10 Ibid., Leçons iii and iv, Eng. trans., pp. 43-89.

30

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

owes its purity and power of illumination only to the
fact that the intellect, one day, was stirred to its
depths and trans-illuminated by the impact of the
act of existing apprehended in things, and because
it was quickened to the point of receiving this act, or
hearkening to it, within itself, in the intelligible and
super-intelligible integrity of the tone peculiar to it.
There are diverse ways and paths leading towards
the attainment of this intuition. None is traced in
advance, none is more legitimate than another—pre­
cisely because here there is no question of rational
analysis or of an inductive or a deductive procedure,
or of a syllogistic construction, but only of an intui­
tion which is a primary fact. The senses, and what
St. Thomas calls the ‘judgment of sense,’ the blind
existential perception exercised by the senses, play
here a primordial and indispensable part. But this is
no more than a prerequisite; the eyes of him who
was blind from birth must be opened; the touch of
the spiritual virtues of the intellect must release into
intelligible light this act of existing which sense at­
tains without discovering it and touches without per­
ceiving it. It matters little whether the intuition of
being resemble the innate gift of an imperial intel­
ligence serenely relying upon its limpid strength and
upon the cooperation of a pure and delicate flesh,
and of a vivid and perfectly balanced sensibility, as
seems to have been the case for Thomas Aquinas;
whether, alternatively, it spring unexpectedly like a
kind of natural grace at the sight of a blade of grass
or a windmill, or at the sudden perception of the
reality of the self; whether it proceed from the im­
placability with which the being of things independ­
ent of ourselves becomes abruptly evident to us,
suddenly casting our own being back upon its soli­

BEING

SI

tude and its frailty; whether I make my way towards
it by inner experience of duration, or of anguish, or
of certain moral realities which transcend the flow
of time—these alternatives, I repeat, are of slight
moment. What counts is to take the leap, to release,
in one authentic intellectual intuition, the sense of
being, the sense of the value of the implications that
lie in the act of existing. What counts is to have seen
that existence is not a simple empirical fact but a
primitive datum for the mind itself, opening to the
mind an infinite supra-observable field—in a word,
the primary and super-intelligible source of intelligi­
bility.
It is not enough to teach philosophy, even Thomist
philosophy, in order to possess this intuition. Let us
call it a matter of luck, a boon, perhaps a kind of
docility to the fight. Without it man will always have
an opining, precarious and sterile knowledge, how­
ever freighted with erudition it may be; a knowledge
about. He will go round and round the flame without
ever going through it. With it, even though he stray
from the path, he will always go farther than he can
advance by years of mere dialectical exercise, critical
reflection, or conceptual dissection of phenomena;
and he will have the added privilege of solitude and
melancholy. If the poet can be called a seer, the phi­
losopher is no less entitled to this name, though in
his own way. He may at times be the victim of some
bewilderment; but at other times he will know the
joy of discovery; and for all of the knowledge he will
have got out of books, for all of his knowledge of life,
he will owe both bewilderment and joy to the fact
that he remains enraptured with being.

32

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

The Concept of Existence or of To-exist (esse)
and that of Being or of That-which is ( ens )

7. The foregoing reflections face us with a para­
dox which we must attempt to clear up. We said
that the intelligible apprehended in our ideas was
essence. But existence is not an essence; it is shut off
from the whole order of essence. How then can it be
the object of the intellect, and its supreme object?
How can we speak of the concept or the idea of ex­
istence? Ought we not to say rather that existence is
not apprehended by the intellect, or apprehensible
by it? that existence does not admit of conceptualisa­
tion, is no more than a limit (set up on every side
by reality) upon the philosophical chase after es­
sences? that existence is an unknowable upon which
metaphysics builds without itself attaining to it?
What has already been said gives a premonition
of the answer. Essences are the object of the first
operation of the intellect, or simple apprehension.
It is judgment which the act of existing confronts.
The intellect envelops itself and is self-contained,
is wholly present in each of its operations; and in
the initial upsurge of its activity out of the world of
sense, in the first act of self-affirmation accomplished
by expressing to itself any datum of experience, it
apprehends and judges in the same instant. It forms
its first idea (that of being) while uttering its first
judgment (of existence), and utters its first judg­
ment while forming its first idea. I say, therefore,
that it thus lays hold of the treasure which properly
belongs to judgment, in order to envelop it in simple
apprehension itself; it visualises that treasure in an

BEING

33

initial and absolutely original idea, in a privileged
idea which is not the result of the process of simple
apprehension alone, but of the laying hold of that
which the intellect affirms from the moment it
judges, namely, the act of existing. It seizes upon
the eminent intelligibility or the super-intelligibility
which the act of judging deals with (that of exist­
ence), in order to make of it an object of thought.
Thus existence is made object; but, as I pointed
out earlier, in a higher and analogical sense resulting
from the objectising of a trans-objective act and re­
ferring to trans-objective subjects that exercise or are
able to exercise this act. Here a concept seizes upon
that which is not an essence but is an intelligible in
a higher and analogical sense, a super-intelligible
delivered up to the mind in the very operation which
it performs each time that it judges, and from the
moment of its first judgment.
But this concept of existence, of to-exist (esse) is
not and cannot be cut off from the absolutely pri­
mary concept of being (ens, that-which is, thatwhich exists, that whose act is to exist). This is so
because the affirmation of existence, or the judg­
ment, which provides the content of such a concept,
is itself the ‘composition of a subject with existence,
i.e., the affirmation that something exists ( actually or
possibly, simply or with such-and-such a predicate).
It is the concept of being (that-which exists or is
able to exist) which, in the order of ideative percep­
tion, corresponds adequately to this affirmation in
the order of judgment. The concept of existence can­
not be visualised completely apart, detached, iso­
lated, separated from that of being; and it is in that
concept of being and with that concept of being that
it is at first conceived. Here we touch upon the origi-

34

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

nal error that underlies all the modern existentialist
philosophies. Ignorant of or neglecting the warning
of the old scholastic wisdom, that ‘the act of existing
cannot be the object of a perfect abstraction,’ these
philosophies presuppose that existence can be iso­
lated. They contend that existence alone is the
nourishing soil of philosophy. They treat of existence
without treating of being.11 They call themselves
philosophies of existence instead of calling them­
selves philosophies of being.
All this simply amounts to saying that the concept
of existence cannot be detached from the concept of
essence. Inseparable from each other, these two
make up one and the same concept, simple although
intrinsically varied; one and the same essentially
analogous concept, that of being. This is the first of
all concepts, because it springs in the mind at the
first awakening of thought, at the first intelligible
coming to grips with the experience of sense by
transcending sense. All other concepts are variants
or determinations of this primary one. At the instant
when the finger points to that which the eye sees,
at the instant when sense perceives, in its blind fash­
ion, without intellection or mental word, that this ex­
ists; at that instant the intellect says (in a judg­
ment), this being is or exists and at the same time
(in a concept), being.12 We have here a mutual in­
11 Or rather (and this is no better) they claim, as Hei­
degger does, to propound a treatise on being when, starting
from existence or rather from the existential spot of actu­
ality, they only phenomenalise it.
12 Of course, I am not speaking here of verbally formu­
lated operations, nor even of operations explicitly thought.
The essential thing is that they be there implicitly, in actu
exercito. There are primitive languages which do not pos­
sess the word “being.’ But the idea of being is implicitly

BEING

35

volution of causes, a reciprocal priority of this con­
cept and this judgment, each preceding the other in
a different order. To say, ‘this being is or exists,’ the
idea of being must be present. To have the idea of
being, the act of existing must have been affirmed
and grasped in a judgment. Generally speaking,
simple apprehension precedes judgment in the later
stages of the process of thinking; but here, at the
first awakening of thought, each depends upon the
other. The idea of being (‘this being’) precedes the
judgment of existence in the order of material or
subjective causality; and the judgment of existence
precedes the idea of being in the order of formal
causality. The more one ponders this issue, the more
it appears that this is how the intellect concep­
tualises existence and forms its idea of being—of the
vague being known to common sense.

8. When, moving on to the queen-science, meta­
physics, and to that higher intuition of which I spoke
a while back, the intellect disengages being from the
knowledge of the sensible in which it is immersed,
in order to make it the object or rather the subject of
metaphysics; when, in a word, it conceptualises the
metaphysical intuition of being (seen now in the
light of all the values proper to it, in its typical and
primordial intelligible density), what the intellect
releases into that same light13 is, here again, first
and foremost, the act of existing.
present in the mind of the primitive men who use those
languages. The first idea formed by a child is not the idea
of being; but the idea of being is implicit in the first idea
which the child forms.
13 At the moment when sense apprehends an existent
sensible, the concept of being and the judgment, ‘this being
exists,’ which condition each other, arise simultaneously in

36

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

At that point, according to classical Thomist docthe intellect, as I have pointed out above. In this first of
all our concepts released for its own sake, the metaphysical
intellect perceives being in its analogical amplitude and in
its freedom with respect to empirical conditions. With this
notion as point of departure—a notion whose fecundity is
inexhaustible—metaphysics formulates the first divisions of
being and the first principles. The principle of identity has
a significance which is not only ‘essential’ or ‘copulative’
(‘every being is what it is’), but also and primarily existen­
tial (‘that which exists, exists’). (Cf. Sept Leçons sur
l’Etre, p. 105, Eng. trans., pp. 93-94.) When, by the ‘re­
flection’ which judgment has primed, the subject grasps
itself as existent, and grasps the extra-mental existence of
things, it merely renders reflexively explicit that which it
already knew. The extra-mental existence of things was
given to it from the very start in the intuition and concept
of being. (I mean to say that this intuition presents being
according to the very analogicity of this concept, so that
being is grasped as existing, actually or possibly, contin­
gently or necessarily; and that, in the particular analogate
of being most immediately attained—the sensible existent,
and, more generally speaking, things—this extra-mental
existence is given as contingent and not as forming part of
the notion of things. )
In other words, the following stages should be distin­
guished:
1. ‘Judgment’ (improperly so-called) of the external
senses and the aestimative, such as it is found in animals,
and bearing upon a sensible existent given to perception.
This is, in the sphere of sense (with its treasure of intelli­
gibility in potency, but in no wise in act) the ‘blind’ equiva­
lent of what we express in saying, ‘this exists.’
2. Formation—in one simultaneous awakening of the in­
tellect and the judgment which mutually involve each
other—of an idea ( ‘this being’ or simply ‘this thing’ in which
the idea of being is implicitly present) and a judgment
composing the object of thought in question with the act of
existing (not with the notion of existence, but with the act
of existing ) : ‘this thing exists’ or ‘this being exists.’
In forming this judgment the intellect, on the one hand,
knows the subject as singular (indirectly and by ‘reflection
upon phantasms’), and, on the other hand, affirms that this
singular subject exercises the act of existing. In other words,
the intellect itself exercises upon the notion of this subject

BEING

37

trine, it has reached the third degree of abstrac­
tion.14 But it is clear from this how false it would
an act (the act of affirming) by which it lives intentionally
the existence of the thing. This affirmation has the same
content as the judgment’ of the aestimative and the exter­
nal sense (but in this case that content is no longer “blind’
but openly revealed since it is raised to the state of intelli­
gibility in act); and it is not by reflection upon phantasms
that the intellect proffers the affirmation, but by and in
this ‘judgment’ itself, and in this intuition of sense which
it grasps by immaterialising it, in order to express it to
itself. It thus reaches the actus essendi (in judging)—as it
reaches essence (in conceiving)—by the mediation of sen­
sorial perception.
3. Formation of the idea of existence.—From the point
when, conjointly with the first judgment of existence, the
idea of being (“that which exists or is able to exist’) has
thus emerged, the intellect grasps the act of existing affirmed
in the first judgment of existence, in order to make of it
an object of thought; it makes unto itself a concept or no­
tion of existence (existentia ut significata).
4. Intuition of first principles, especially of the principle
of identity (“that which exists, exists’; ‘every being is what
it is’).
5. Only thereafter, by an explicit reflection upon its act,
does the intellect become explicitly conscious of the exist­
ence of the thinking subject. It does not merely live the
cogito, it expresses it. And by opposition:
6. It knows explicitly, as extra-mental, the being and the
existence which in their extra-mental reality had already
been given to it in fact at stages 2, 3, and 4.
This analysis concurs with that of Father GarrigouLagrange (De intelligentia naturali et de primo objecto ab
ipsa cognito, in Acta Pontif. Acad. Romanae S. Thoma Aq.,
Rome, 1940) in that it places the intuition of the principle
of identity before the moment when the thinking subject
becomes conscious of its own existence. It differs in plac­
ing the first judgment of existence (which conditions the
formation of the idea of being and is conditioned by it)
before the moment when the thinking subject becomes con­
scious of its own existence and even before the intuition of
the principle of identity.
14 The doctrine expounded by St. Thomas in the com­
mentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius (in De Trin., q. 5,

38

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

be to place the degrees of abstraction upon the same
line as if mathematics were merely more abstract
a. 3, c.; cf. the important note in which Father Geiger cites
the article in question in its exact import and from the
autographic manuscript: L. B. Geiger, La Participation dans
la philosophie de saint Thomas d’Aquin, Paris, 1942, pp.
318-319) confirms the thesis that the metaphysical concept
of being, as earlier the common sense concept formed by
the intellect upon its first awakening, is an eidetic visualisa­
tion of being apprehended in judgment, in the secunda
operatio intellectus, quae respicit ipsum esse rei. This doc­
trine shows indeed that what properly pertains to the meta­
physical concept of being is that it results from an
abstraction (or a separation from matter) which takes place
secundum hanc secundam operationem intellectus. (‘Hac
operatione intellectus vere abstrahere non potest, nisi ea quae
sunt secundum rem separata.’) If it can be separated from
matter by the operation of the (negative) judgment, the
reason is that it is related in its content to the act of exist­
ing which is signified by the (positive) judgment and which
over-passes the line of material essences—the connatural
object of simple apprehension.
In this article on the De Trinitate St. Thomas reserves
the noun ahstractio strictly understood for the operation by
which the intellect considers and grasps separately an ob­
ject of thought which in reality cannot exist without the
other things which the intellect leaves outside its considera­
tion. (Wherefore, ‘ea quorum unum sine alio intelligitur
sunt simul secundum rem.’) When, accordingly, he distin­
guishes between the ahstractio ‘common to all the sciences’
(first degree of intensive abstraction) and the ahstractio
formae a materia sensibili which is proper to mathematics
(second degree of intensive abstraction) on the one hand,
and, on the other hand, the separatio proper to metaphysics
where, because it takes place secundum illam operationem
quae componit et dividit, the intellect divides one thing
from another per hoc quod intelligit unum alii non inesse,
he means (as he teaches constantly, for example, in his
commentary on the Metaphysics) that things which are the
object of metaphysics exist or are able to exist without mat­
ter, are or are able to be separated from every material
condition in the very existence they exercise outside the
mind (separatio secundum ipsum esse rei). It is in a judg­
ment declaring that being is not necessarily linked to matter
nor to any of its conditions that the intellect abstracts being

BEING

39

and more general than physics, and metaphysics
more abstract and more general than mathematics.
from all matter and makes for itself the metaphysical con­
cept of being as being. If St. Thomas thus emphasises the
distinction between the separatio proper to metaphysics and
the mere ahstractio which belongs to the other sciences, the
reason is that he seeks to show, against the Platonists, that
transcendentals can exist apart from matter, but that uni­
versals and mathematicals cannot. ‘Et quia quidam non
intellexerunt differentiam duorum ultimorum (common ab­
straction and mathematical abstraction) a primo (metaphys­
ical ‘separation’), inciderunt in errorem, ut ponerent mathe­
matica et universalia a sensibilibus separata, ut Pythagorici
et Platonici.’
There is nothing more to be looked for in these texts,
and they do not at all signify that the separatio in question
ought to be substituted for the ‘abstraction called analogical’
(third degree of intensive abstraction). The fact that St.
Thomas here employs the word separatio rather than the
word ahstractio (reserved for cases where the object sepa­
rately grasped cannot exist separately) in no wise prevents
this separatio—since it ends in an idea, and an idea the
object signified by which is the farthest removed from mat­
ter—from being an abstraction in the general or rather pro­
portional meaning of the word (but which is not produced
in the line of simple apprehension of essences! ). This
‘separation’ is the analogical abstraction of being.
In this very text St. Thomas, as a matter of fact, employs
the word abstrahere with reference to the separation which
takes place in judgment: ‘Secundum hanc secundam opera­
tionem intellectus abstrahere non potest vere quod secundum
rem conjunctum est, quia in abstrahendo significatur esse
separatio secundum ipsum esse rei, sicut si abstraho homi­
nem ab albedine dicendo: homo non est albus, significo
separationem esse in re. . . . Hac igitur operatione intellec­
tus vere abstrahere non potest, nisi ea quae sunt secundum
rem separata, ut cum dicitur: homo non est asinus.’
Between the triplex distinctio of the commentary on the
De Trinitate of Boethius and the three degrees of abstrac­
tion of Cajetan and John of St. Thomas there is a difference
of vocabulary, there is no difference of doctrine. The doc­
trine of the three degrees of abstraction has its basis in the
Metaphysics of Aristotle, where it finds an equivalent for­
mulation. Cf. St. Thomas, In Metaph. Aristotelis Prooe­
mium, VI, i, Cathala ed., 1156-1165; XI, 7, Cathala ed.,

40

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

By no means! What is common to the three degrees
of abstraction is only analogically common to them.
Each corresponds to a typically and irreducibly dif­
ferent manner of confronting and grasping reality,
to a ‘hold’ that is sui generis in the struggle of the
intellect with things. The abstraction proper to met­
aphysics does not proceed from a ‘simple apprehen­
sion’ or an eidetic visualisation of a universal more
universal than the others. It proceeds from the
eidetic visualisation of a transcendental which per­
meates everything and whose intelligibility involves
an irreducible proportionality or analogy—a is to it
own act of existing (esse) as b is to its own act cJ
existing (esse),—because this is precisely what judg
ment discovers, namely, the actuation of a being
the act of existing, grasped as extending beyoi.
the limits and conditions of empirical existence;
grasped, therefore, in the limitless amplitude of its
intelligibility.
If metaphysics is established at the highest degree
of abstraction, the reason is precisely that, unlike all
the other sciences, in concerning itself with being as
being, as a proper object of analysis and scientific
disquisition, it concerns itself with the very act of
existing. The object of metaphysics is being, or that
whose act is to exist, considered in its quality as be­
ing, that is to say, according as it is not linked to the
material conditions of empirical existence, according
as it exercises or is able to exercise, without matter,
the act of existing. In virtue of the type of abstrac2259-2264. On this doctrine of degrees of abstraction cf.
my writings: Les Degrés du savoir, pp. 71-76, 265-268, 414432, Eng. trans., pp. 44-4-7, 165-167, 257-268; Sept Leçons
sur l’Etre, pp. 85-96; Eng. trans., pp. 75-86. Quatre Essais
sur l’Esprit dans sa condition charnelle, Paris, 1939, pp. 231232, 237-238.

BEING

41

tion which characterises it, metaphysics considers
realities which exist, or are able to exist, without
matter. It abstracts from the material conditions of
empirical existence, but it does not abstract from ex­
istence! Existence is the terms as a function of which
metaphysics knows everything that it does know; I
say, real existence, either actual or possible, not ex­
istence as a singular datum of sense or of conscious­
ness, but as disengaged from the singular by abstrac­
tive intuition; existence not reduced to this moment
of existential actuality actually experienced (in
which alone the existentialist phenomenologists are
interested) but liberated in that intelligible ampli■ tude which it possesses as the act of that which is,
-nd which affords a grasp on the necessary and uni­
versal certainties of a scientific knowledge properly
so-called. Moreover, it is in things themselves that
metaphysics finds its object. It is the being of sensi­
ble and material things, the being of the world of
experience, which is its immediately accessible field
of investigation;15 it is this which, before seeking its
cause, it discerns and scrutinises—not as sensible and
material, but as being. Before rising to the level of
spiritual existents, it is empirical existence, the ex­
istence of material things, that it holds in its grasp
15 The goal of metaphysics is knowledge of the cause of
being-common-to-the-ten-predicaments, but its subject is
that common being itself: ‘Quamvis autem subjectum hujus
scientiae sit ens commune, dicitur tamen tota de his quae
sunt separata a material secundum esse et rationem. Quia
secundum esse et rationem separari dicuntur, non solum
illa quae nunquam in material esse possunt, sicut Deus et
intellectuales substantiae, sed etiam illa quae possunt sine
materia esse, sicut ens commune. Hoc tamen non contin­
geret, si a materia secundum esse dependerent.’ St. Thomas
Aquinas, In Metaph. Aristotelis, Prooemium.

42

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

—though not as empirical and material, but as ex­
istence.
Thus, its being more universal than the other sci­
ences is but a quasi-incidental consequence of the
immateriality of its object and its vision. By the na­
ture of metaphysical knowledge and by the very fact
that its own peculiar insight ( which consists in see­
ing that which, according to its proper intelligible
constitutive characteristics, is free of matter) en­
ables it to penetrate into things without being halted
by material characteristics, metaphysics is con­
cerned with that which is most profound in things
concrete and individual—their being, discovered in
its quality of being and in the act of existing which
things exercise or are able to exercise. If it does not
reach individuality, that is not because it cannot do
so by reason of its own noetic structure. I should say
that that is not its own fault; rather, it is the fault
of matter, which is, in the individual, the root of nonbeing and unintelligibility. The proof of this is that
when metaphysics passes from being to the cause of
being, the supreme reality that it knows ( wrapped,
it is true, in the veils of analogy) is the supremely
individual reality, the reality of the pure Act, the
Ipsum esse subsistens. It is the only science that is
able to reach the individual, I mean, the individual
par excellence. The worst metaphysical heresy is
that which regards being as the genus generalis­
simum and makes of it at one and the same time a
univocal thing and a pure essence. Being is not a
universal; its infinite amplitude, its super-universal­
ity, if the reader prefers, is that of an implicitly mul­
tiple object of thought which, analogically, per­
meates all things and descends, in its irreducible
diversity, into the very heart of each: it is not merely

BEING

43

that which they are, but is also their very act of ex­
isting.
There is a concept of existence. In this concept,
existence is taken ut significata,16 as signified to the
mind after the fashion of an essence, although it is
not an essence. But metaphysics does not treat of
the concept of existence; no science stops at the con­
cept; all sciences proceed through it to reality.17 It
is not of the concept of existence, it is of existence
itself that the science of being treats. And when it
treats of existence (it always treats of it, at least in
some fashion) the concept of which it makes use
does not display to it an essence but, as Etienne Gil­
son puts it,18 that which has for its essence not to
be an essence. There is analogy, not univocity, be­
tween such a concept and the concepts of which the
other sciences make use. They use their concepts in
order to know the realities signified by those con­
cepts; but those realities are essences. Metaphysics
uses the concept of existence in order to know a re­
ality which is not an essence, but is the very act of
existing.
I have mentioned that the concept of existence
cannot be detached from that of essence: existence
is always the existence of something, of a capacity
to exist. The very notion of essentia signifies a re­
lation to esse, which is why we have good grounds
10 Cf. Cajetan, In Sum. theol., i, 2, 1, ad 2; and my
Songe de Descartes, pp. 192-198, Eng. trans., pp. 131-132.
17 Which holds also for faith: ‘Actus credentis non termi­
natur ad enuntiabile, sed ad rem’ holds also for science:
‘Non enim formamus enuntiabilia nisi ut per ea de rebus
cognitionem habeamus, sicut in scientia, ita et in fide.’ St.
Thomas, Sum. theol., II-II, 1, 2, ad 2.
18 Cf. Etienne Gilson, ‘Limites existentielles de la philo­
sophie,’ in L’Existence, Paris, 1945, p. 80.

44

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

for saying that existence is the primary source of in­
telligibility.19 But, not being an essence or an intel­
ligible, this primary source of intelligibility has to be
a super-intelligible. When we say that being is that
which exists or is able to exist, that which exercises
or is able to exercise existence, a great mystery is
contained in these few words. In the subject, that
which, we possess an essence or an intelligible—in so
far as it is this or that, in so far as it possesses a na­
ture. In the verb exists we have the act of existing,
or a super-intelligible. To say that which exists is to
join an intelligible to a super-intelligible; it is to have
before our eyes an intelligible engaged in and per­
fected by a super-intelligibility. Why should it be as­
tonishing that at the summit of all beings, at the
point where everything is carried to pure transcend­
ent act, the intelligibility of essence should fuse in
an absolute identity with the super-intelligibility of
existence, both infinitely overflowing what is desig­
nated here below by their concepts, in the incom­
prehensible unity of Him Who is?
»
The Implications of the Intuition of Being

g. I have tried to state precisely some aspects of
the fundamental intuition upon which everything in
Thomism depends. A commentary upon this intui­
tion of being would be endless.20 The most funda­
mental and most characteristic metaphysical thesis
of Aristotelianism as re-thought by Thomas Aquinas,
19 Cf. above, pp. 20, 21.
20 Cf. J. Maritain, Sept Leçons sur ÏEtre, Leçons iii to
vi. Eng. trans., pp. 43 ff.

BEING

45

the thesis of the real distinction between essence
and existence in all that is not God—in other words,
the extension of the doctrine of potency and act to
the relation between essence and existence, is di­
rectly connected with this intuition. This is, in truth,
a thesis of extreme boldness, for in it potency (es­
sence, or intelligible structure already achieved in
its own line of essence) is completed or actuated by
an act of another order which adds absolutely noth­
ing to essence as essence, intelligible structure, or
quiddity, yet adds everything to it in as much as it
posits it extra causas or extra nihil. We can under­
stand nothing of this if we confine ourselves within
a purely essentialist perspective, if we do not see
that the very intelligibility of the essences—I say, in
things, not in our mind, where they are separated
from things—if we do not see that the very intel­
ligibility of essences is a certain kind of ability to
exist. Potentia dicitur ad actum: knowability or in­
telligibility, essence, is to be understood in its rela­
tionship to the act of existing. The analogical infini­
tude of the act of existing is a created participation
in the unflawed oneness of the infinity of the Ipsum
esse subsistens; an analogical infinitude which is di­
versified according to the possibilities of existing. In
relation to it those very possibilities of existing, the
essences, are knowable or intelligible. Made real by
the act of existing—that is to say, placed outside the
state of simple possibility—they are really distinct
from it as potency is really distinct from the act that
actuates it; for if they were their own existence they
would be Existence and Intelligibility in pure act,
and would no longer be created essences.
Thus the act of existing is the act par excellence.
Whether we consider it in this humble blade of grass

46

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

or in the feeble beating of our heart, it is everywhere
the act and the perfection of all form and all perfec­
tion. Hoc quod dico esse est actualitas omnium
actuum, et propter hoc est perfectio omnium perfec­
tionum.27 ‘The act of existing is the actuality of ev­
ery form or nature’;21
2223
24
‘it is the actuality of all things,
and even of forms themselves.’28 The act of existing,
which is not an essence, which is neither this nor
that, and which could not be called act or energy or
form or perfection if these words were univocal and
could not designate something outside the whole or­
der of essence, the act of existing is that which is
most actual and most formal, illud quod est maxime
formale omnium est ipsum esse,2i ipsum esse est
perfectissimum omnium.25 St. Thomas is fully con­
vinced that a living dog is better than a dead lion2627
28
—though he also thinks, to the annoyance of some,
that a lion (living) is better than a dog. And he is
convinced also that beyond the whole order of be­
ing, extra omne genus respectu totius esse,27 ‘God
contains within himself all the perfection of being’
because He is Being itself, or ‘the very act of existing,
subsistent by itself.’28 The first cause is above that
which is or that which has being (supra ens); not,
as the Platonists believed, because the essence of
goodness and of unity was higher than being con­
ceived as a separate essence, but because the first
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28

St. Thomas, De Pot., 7, 2, ad 9.
Sum. theol., I, 3, 4, c.
Ibid., I, 4, 1, ad 3.
Ibid., I, 7, i, c.
Ibid., I, 4, i, ad 3.
Ecclesiastes, IX, 4.
Sum. theol., I, 3, 6, ad 2.
Sum. theol., I, 4, 2, c.

BEING

47

cause is the infinite act of existence itself, inquan­
tum est ipsum esse infinitum.29
10. It could be easily shown that all the other
great specifically Thomist theses also possess mean­
ing only for a mind turned in the first instance to­
wards existence. This is why they will always be dis­
puted by every philosophy that is not centered upon
the primacy of the act of existing.
It is thus with the theory of universals and with
that of the virtual distinction. If universals are based
upon things, yet are not to be found as such except
in the mind; if there is no middle ground between
real distinction and distinction of reason, the expla­
nation is that the way in which things exercise the
act of existing relegates to purely ideal existence all
the conditions of existence which they don as objects
of thought.
It is the same with the theory of potency and par­
ticularly that of materia prima. If potency is in no
wise a rough sketch of act or a virtuality, the reason
is that the world is not a dictionary of essences or of
ideal possibles, each intelligible by itself, be it only
as mere sketch or mere virtuality, but that there is
in things a dimension of opacity or of radical unintelligibility—a deposit of reality not intelligible by it­
self—which lies the deeper in proportion to the dis­
tance which separates things from the pure act of
existing. If matter is absolutely without act, form, or
determination, the reason is that it is not an essence
but merely a potency, even in relation to essence;
and if it is not an essence the reason is that essence
is to be understood in relation to the act of existing;
29 Comm, in Libr. de Causis, Lectio 6.

48

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

and that which does not in itself constitute a pos­
sibility of existing is not an essence.
It is the same with the theory of the human com­
posite. If the spiritual and subsistent soul is the
unique and substantial form of the human sub­
stance, and if man is not made up of two juxtaposed
essences ( as Cartesian spiritualism would have it, to
the misfortune of modern thought); if man is a sin­
gle natural whole—biological, sentient, rational—in
virtue of the actuation of materia prima by a form
which is a spirit, the reason is that form (like es­
sence) of itself implies a relationship to existence
( esse per se convenit formae ) and that it ought not
to be conceived only as that by which a subject pos­
sesses in its essences such-and-such intelligible de­
terminations, but also as that by which it is determinately constituted for existing and receives from
its causes existential actuation. In an essentialist per­
spective, the intellective soul is only that by which
I think; and extension ( or any other material form )
is that by which I have a body. But in an existen­
tialist perspective the intellective soul is that by
which existence takes hold of my whole self, my
body and my senses and my thought as well, and
is that by which the prime matter itself which it in­
forms is maintained in existence.
It is the same with the theory of evil. If evil,
though it be an absence or lack of being, is by no
means a mere diminution of good; and if it is real
and if it is active and if it even has enough power
to undo the work of God, the reason is that it is not
a mere lacuna in an essence but is a privation within
a subject exercising the act of existing, a wound in
existence; and further because, acting not by itself

BEING

49

but by the good in which it ‘nihilates,’* evil is the
more active and the stronger as this existent subject
which it wounds by non-being is the more deeply
wounded and itself exercises a more active and a
higher existence.
It is the same with the theory of the immanent
acts of knowing and loving. No analysis conducted
in terms of essence is capable of giving account of
these acts. It is in terms of existence that they re­
quire to be conceived—at which moment each of
them appears as a typical manner of actively super­
existing: knowledge as the immaterial super-exist­
ence in which the knower intentionally is, or be­
comes, the known; love as the immaterial super-ex­
istence in which the beloved is or becomes, in the
lover, the principle of a gravitational pull or inten­
tional connaturality by which the lover tends in­
wardly towards existential union with the beloved,
as towards its own being from which it has been sep­
arated, and thus loses itself in the reality of the
beloved.30
It is the same with the theory of liberty regarded
as an indetermination, not potential but active and
dominating, and as the mastery of the will over the
very judgment that determines it. There is here, in
the last analysis, a primacy of exercise over specifica­
tion which shocks every philosophy of pure essence
° The coinages ‘nihilate’ and ‘nihilation’ will be used
throughout this translation to render the French words ( also
coined) néanter and néant ement. ‘To nihilate’ does not
mean ‘to give non-being,’ which would rather be expressed
by the word ‘negate,’ nor does it mean ‘to deprive of being’
or ‘annihilate.’ It signifies simply to abstain from giving
feeing.—Translator’s Note.
30 Les Degrés du savoir, pp. 734-736. Eng. trans., pp.
452-453-

3

5o

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

and which has meaning only because at the indivisi­
ble instant when will and intellect determine each
other, the act of the will causes the subject to exist,
decidedly, according to the particular attitude or
disposition of its whole moral nature, in relation to
which a particular good will be appropriate to that
subject; and that same act of the will renders the
corresponding judgment of the intellect efficacious,
or, in other words, causes it to get a grip on exist­
ence decidedly
*
It is the same with the theory of divine motion in
respect of human liberty. If the divine motion deter­
mined the human will in the way that, in the world
of essences, coordinates determine a direction, or a
perpendicular determines a point on a line, we
should never be able to understand how the human
will can remain free while it is being moved by God.
But everything changes when the mind places itself
in the perspective of the act of existing; and when
we understand, on the contrary, that human liberty
(that sovereign actuality which consists in the dom­
inating indetermination and mastery of the will over
the judgment which determines it) could not act,
could not be exercised, if the motion of the first cause
did not activate it from within to realise itself in ex­
istence, as it activates all causes according to their
own mode of acting to the exercise of their existen­
tial act.
More generally, indeed, it is clear that the notions
of efficient cause and of finality, which are so nat­
ural to common sense but so thorny for philosophers,
and upon which all the great modem metaphysical
* ‘Decidedly,’ that is, consequent upon a decision, as to
exist ‘intentionally’ is a mode consequent upon a tendency.
—Translator’s Note.

BEING

51

systems have foundered (leaving it in the end to
philosophies subjugated by the science of phenom­
ena to expel them), those notions, I say, cannot en­
ter into a properly philosophical context and be
justified in that context except from the point of
view of an existentialist intellectualism like that of
Thomas Aquinas. For no pure essence will ever be
a cause or ever be an end. Efficient causality is an
overflow into existence which supposes a tendency
in beings thus to superabound existentially. And fi­
nal causality is the reason for this overflow of beings
into existence, and for the orientation of the tend­
ency within them to surpass themselves existen­
tially. This is why their causality is exercised only in
virtue of that super-causality by which the activa­
tion of the First Existent penetrates them, and in
virtue of that super-finality by which they love the
separated common Good more than themselves and
tend towards it ( even though they be but birds, or
moss, or inanimate molecules) more primordially
and more intensely than towards their own specific
end.

11. At this point there appears an aspect of Thomism which is in my opinion of first importance. By
the very fact that the metaphysics of St. Thomas is
centered, not upon essences but upon existence—
upon the mysterious gushing forth of the act of ex­
isting in which, according to the analogical variety
of the degrees of being, qualities and natures are actualised and formed, which qualities and natures re­
fract and multiply the transcendent unity of sub­
sistent Being itself in its created participations—this
metaphysics lays hold, at its very starting point, of
being as superabundant. Being superabounds every­

52

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

where; it scatters its gifts and fruits in profusion.
This is the action in which all beings here below
communicate with one another and in which, thanks
to the divine influx that traverses them, they are at
every instant—in this world of contingent existence
and of unforeseeable future contingents—either bet­
ter or worse than themselves and than the mere fact
of their existence at a given moment. By this action
they exchange their secrets, influence one another
for good or ill, and contribute to or betray in one
another the fecundity of being, the while they are
carried along despite themselves in the torrent of
divine governance from which nothing can escape.
Above time, in the primary and transcendent
Source, it is the superabundance of the divine act
of existing, superabundance in pure act, which man­
ifests itself in God Himself (as revelation teaches
us) by the plurality of the divine Persons, and (as
reason is of itself qualified to know) by the fact that
the very existence of God is Intelligence and is Love,
and by the fact that this existence is freely creative.
Moreover this divine plenitude does not merely
give, it gives itself. And it was, in the last analysis,
in order to give itself to spiritual beings apt to re­
ceive it that, specifically, it created the world. It is
not for Himself but for us, St. Thomas says, that God
made all things for His glory.
Now if being is superabundant and communica­
tive of itself, if it gives itself, love is thereby justi­
fied; justified also is that eros, that natural love
which is coextensive with being and which instils in
all things, at every degree of being, an ineradicable
and multiform propensity. Justified, too, that stimu­
lation and that aspiration to emerge from self to
share the very life of the beloved, which are con-

BEING

53

substantial with the human being and which no phi­
losophy of pure essence is capable of recognising.
For a Spinoza the summit of wisdom and of human
perfection will be to love God intellectually, that is
to say, to consent, as a pure disinterested spectator,
to the universal order of things, without asking to be
loved in return, because Spinoza’s God is but a sub­
sistent essence. But for St. Thomas Aquinas the sum­
mit of wisdom and of human perfection was to love
lovingly the sovereignly personal principle of every
act of existing; not only to love it, but also—nay,
above all!—to be loved by it; in other words, to open
oneself to the plenitude of its love descending into
us and overflowing from us so that we may continue
through time its work and communicate its good­
ness.31
If love and propensity are coextensive with being;
if the good is an epiphany of being; if all things as­
pire; if all things are at grips with existence; if all
things pour out their being in action; if all things
strive, each after its own fashion, towards the sub­
sistent Good which infinitely transcends them; if, in
all things, being and the transcendental properties
of being tend towards that plenitude which is higher
than any name, where all are identified in an intan­
gible life, and exist in pure act—is it not clear that the
philosophy of being is also, is identical with, the phi­
losophy of the dynamism of being?—and is not all
this true because to exist is act par excellence and
because the Act of Existing, subsistent by itself, is
above the whole order of beings, perfections, exist­
ences which are its created participations and which
contrive together in its attraction and in its activa31 Cf. J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, pp.
312-334.

54

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

tíon? Those who on the pretext that natures and in­
telligible structures and degrees of being exist for
this philosophy, regard its conception of reality as
‘static,’ as they say, simply own that they do not
know what they are talking about. Devoted to the
mystery of the act of existing, this philosophy is by
that very fact devoted to the mystery of action and
the mystery of movement.
I do not question that St. Thomas Aquinas made
no systematic use of the idea of development or evo­
lution in the modern sense of these words. But, for
one thing, that idea itself is neither enlightening nor
fertile except in the context of an ontological analy­
sis of reality. In claiming to take the place of such
an analysis, and itself become the supreme explana­
tory principle, it does no more, as Goethe observed,
than to exercise upon thought an infinite power of
dissolution. For it is not a metaphysical instrument
and it does not concern the analytical explanation
of being; it is an historic instrument and concerns
the historical explanation of becoming. For another
thing, it is quite true that history was not the strong
side of the Middle Ages, and that historical explana­
tion was absent from the sciences of nature with
which St. Thomas had to deal. That is a conquest
of modern science. But to enclose a metaphysic in
a compartment of history is not a way to give evi­
dence of a sense of history; and it is no proof of
philosophic sense to think that there is nothing more
in a metaphysic than the scientific imagery which,
in a given era, permitted it to exemplify itself in the
plane of phenomena, which plane never in fact con­
fined it. Not only is everything present in the equip­
ment of Thomism to allow it to find room for the his­
toric dimension in the knowledge of Nature and the

being

55

knowledge of Man, but its primary intuitions await,
so to say, the introduction into it of that dimension;
they are eager to welcome and to carry out the idea
of development and evolution, and to complete the
opus philosophicum by a philosophy of history.

Chapter Two
ACTION

The Perfection of Human Life

12. Up to now we were concerned with meta­
physics and speculative philosophy. I have pointed
out that Thomism is an existentialist intellectualism.
This, coupled with St. Thomas’s insistence on the
primacy of the speculative, illustrates the essential
difference which sets this philosophy apart from
contemporary existentialism as well as from every
philosophy that proves false to its name by repudiat­
ing speculation in favor of action, and confusing
knowledge with power.
In practical or ethical philosophy, with which we
shall now deal, St. Thomas’s existentialism retains
the same intellectualist character, in the sense that
practical philosophy remains speculative in its mode
(since it is philosophy), although practical by rea­
son of its object (which is moral conduct). Here
again there are natures to be known—but this time
they serve to constitute norms of conduct, since prac­
tical knowledge has for its purpose to guide action.
In another sense, however, we must say that in mov­
ing into the domain of ethics this existentialism be­
comes voluntaristic. This is clear when we consider

ACTION

57

the rôle which it assigns to the will (by which alone
a man can be made to be good or bad, in the pure
and absolute meaning of those terms ) and the fact
that it makes the practical judgment dependent
upon the actual movement of the appetite towards
the ends of the subject.
Precisely because in ethics or practical philosophy
Thomist existentialism is ordered, not to the exist­
ence exercised by things, but to the act which the
liberty of the subject will bring into existence, the
differences in metaphysical point of view, profound
though they be, will nevertheless not preclude cer­
tain contacts between this existentialism and con­
temporary existentialism. As a matter of fact, it is in
the domain of moral philosophy that the views
which modern existentialism contributes seem to me
to be the most worthy of interest. However ill it may
conceive liberty, it does have an authentic feeling
for it and for its essential transcendence with re­
gard to the specifications and virtualities of essence,
though they be those of the profound self.’1 It has
a feeling also for the creative importance of the
moral act (creative, of course, in a relative sense),
and the degrees of depth which the moral act com­
ports, as well as of the absolute uniqueness of the
instant (irreducible to any chain of anterior events
and determinations ) when, by the exercise of his lib­
erty, the subject is revealed to himself and ‘com­
mitted.’* (Would that I could avoid using that word!
Yet the way in which it has been made a common­
place shows that its value is appreciated. ) If all this
were not spoiled by the acceptance of absurdity and
1 J. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, pp. 78-81.
* ‘Committed’ is our translation of M. Sartre’s engagé.—
Translator’s Note.

58

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

by the eviction of nature and the forma rationis, as
well as of all object, all causality, and all finality, we
should have here the premises of a moral philosophy
and a philosophy of liberty.
As concerns the fundamentally existential charac­
ter of Thomist2 ethics, I shall confine myself to two
significant and well-known doctrines.
The first relates to the perfection of human life.
St. Thomas teaches that perfection consists in char­
ity, and that each of us is bound to tend towards the
perfection of love according to his condition and in
so far as it is in his power. All morality thus hangs
upon that which is most existential in the world. For
love ( this is another Thomist theme ) does not deal
with possibles or pure essences, it deals with existents. We do not love possibles, we love that which
exists or is destined to exist. And in the last analysis
it is because God is the Act of Existing Itself, in His
ocean of all perfection, that the love of that which
is better than all goodness is that in which man at­
tains the perfection of his being. That perfection
does not consist in reunion with an essence by means
of supreme accuracy in copying the ideal; it consists
in loving, in going through all that is unpredictable,
dangerous, dark, demanding, and insensate in love;
it consists in the plenitude and refinement of dia2 Because of the fundamentally existential character of
Thomist moral philosophy—however vast, necessary, and
fundamental be the part that natural ethics plays in it—a
moral philosophy adequately taken, that is, a moral philos­
ophy really apt to guide action, is conceivable in such a
philosophy only if it takes into account the existential state
of humanity, with all the wounds or weaknesses and all the
resources that it comprises in fact; and if, therefore, it takes
into account the higher data of theology (as well as the
data of ethnology and sociology). Cf. J. Maritain, Science
et Sagesse, pp. 228-362, Eng. trans., pp. 138-220.

ACTION

59

logue and union of person with person to the point
of transfiguration which, as St. John of the Cross says,
make of man a god by participation, ‘two natures in
a single spirit and love,’ in a single spiritual super­
existence of love.

Moral Judgment

13. The second point of doctrine, dominating the
whole theory of the virtue of prudence in particular,
concerns the judgment of the moral conscience and
the manner in which, at the heart of concrete exist­
ence, the appetite enters into the regulation of the
moral act by the reason. Here St. Thomas makes the
rectitude of the intellect depend upon that of the
will; and this because of the practical, not specula­
tive, existentiality of the moral judgment. Not only
is the truth of the practical intellect generally under­
stood to be conformity with right appetite (not, as
in the case of the speculative intellect, conformity
with extramental being), because the end is not to
know that which exists, but to cause that to exist
which is not yet; but also the act of moral choice is
so individualised ( both by the singularity of the per­
son from whom it emanates and by that of the con­
text of contingent circumstance in which it takes
place) that the practical judgment in which it is ex­
pressed and by which I declare to myself, ‘This is
what I need,’ can only be right if actually, hic et
nunc, the dynamism of my willing is right and tends
towards the genuine goods of human life.
This is why practical wisdom, prudentia, is a vir­
tue indivisibly moral and intellectual at the same
time. This is why prudence, as, likewise, the judg-

6o

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

ment of conscience, cannot be replaced by any sort
of science or theoretical knowledge.
The same moral case never appears twice in the
world. To speak absolutely strictly, precedent does
not exist. Each time, I find myself in a situation re­
quiring me to do a new thing, to bring into existence
an act that is unique in the world, an act which must
be in conformity with the moral law in a manner
and under conditions belonging strictly to me alone
and which have never arisen before. Useless to
thumb through the dictionary of cases of conscience!
Moral treatises will of course tell me the universal
rule or rules I am bound to apply; they will not tell
me how I, the unique I, am to apply them in the
unique context in which I am involved. No knowl­
edge of moral essences, however perfect, meticu­
lous, or detailed it may be and however particular­
ised those essences may be ( though they will always
remain general); no casuistry, no chain of pure de­
duction, no science, can exempt me from my judg­
ment of conscience, and, if I have some virtue, from
the exercise of the virtue of prudence, in which ex­
ercise it is the rectitude of my willing that has to
effect the accuracy of my vision. In the practical syl­
logism, the major, which enunciates the universal
rule, speaks only to the intellect; but the minor and
the conclusion are on a different plane; they are put
forward by the whole subject, whose intellect is
swept along towards the existential ends by which
( in virtue of his very liberty ) his appetitive powers
are in fact subjugated.3
3 There are in truth two practical syllogisms, one opening
into the speculativo-practical and the other into the practicopractical. Take this as an example of the first: 'Murder is
forbidden by the Law. This act which attracts me is

ACTION

61

There are objective norms of morality, there are
duties and rules, because the measure of reason is
the formal constitutive element of human morality.
However, I neither apply them, nor apply them
well, unless they are embodied in the ends which
actually attract my desire and in the actual move­
ment of my will. In many cases man finds himself
confronted by simple rules, such as those which for­
bid homicide or adultery. They set him no problem
except the problem of effectively following them.
Yet, in order that a man follow them, at the moment
of temptation they must not merely resound in his
head as mere universal rules which suffice to con­
demn him though not to set him in motion; but he
must recognise in them (by a kind of painful labour
of intussusception and reflection upon himself) an
urgent demand of his most highly individuated,
most personal desire, for the ends upon which he
has made his life depend. If not, he will not do the
good he loves ( loves inefficaciously, only because he
sees it to be good in itself), but he will do the evil
murder. Therefore this act is forbidden by the Law.’ The
conclusion expresses the rule of reason, which I know and
from which I turn away my eyes when I sin. This syllogism
considers the act and its law; the subject does not enter,
unless to be submitted to the universal as any individual x
which forms part of the species.
The following is an example of the second syllogism:
‘Murder is forbidden by the Law. This act which attracts
me is murder, and would cause me to deviate from what
I love best. Therefore 1 shall not do it land long live
law!).’ Or it could be, contrariwise: ‘Murder is forbidden
by the Law. This act which attracts me is murder, and I
make it to be what I love best. Therefore I shall do it ( and
so much the worse for universal law! ).’
In the second syllogism it is the existential disposition of
the subject in the free affirmation of his unique self which
decides the question.

RWi Ange! Abbey library
St. Benedict, Orenen 9737S

62

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

he does not wish to do ( he does not wish it as evil,
though he will at present make of it his good). But
in many cases, which, in truth, form the stuff of our
moral life, man finds himself confronted by a diver­
sity of conflicting duties and multiple rules which
crisscross in a context of circumstance where the
problem *What ought I really do?’ is posed. This is
the time when he must have recourse to the regulae
arbitrariae of prudence; to those rules which not
only take account of all the objective peculiarities
of given conditions, but which become decisive only
by reason of the subject’s deepest attractions
(which, by supposition, are duly orientated) and
the inclinations of his virtues.
14. We are told, as if it were a novelty, that the
motives which reason deliberates upon do not play
the decisive part in the deepest, freest (indeed
wisest) acts of moral option but that this rôle is re­
served to that unforeseeable impulse of one’s in­
scrutable subjectivity, so often disconcerting for the
intellect of the subject himself. How can it be other­
wise, if it is true that the judgment of the subject’s
conscience is obliged, at the moment when judg­
ment is freely made, to take account also of the
whole of the unknown reality within him—his se­
cret capacities, his deeply rooted aspirations, the
strength or frailty of his moral stuff, his virtues (if
he has any), the mysterious call of his destiny? He
cannot formulate any of these things. They are un­
known to him in terms of reason. But the dim in­
stinct he possesses of himself, and his virtue of
prudence (if he has the virtues), know them with­
out knowing it in the indescribable mode of cogni­
tion by connaturality. These are the elements of

ACTION

63

evaluation ( inexpressible in terms of notions ) which
are of highest account for the practical justness of
the decision he will make when his will shall by its
decision have rendered efficacious any objective mo­
tive vitally referred to all this inner world. Thus, the
freest decision may appear to be a sheer result of
fate—though rendered such by the actual exercise of
free choice. The most prudent decision can some­
times appear irrational and inexplicable—its reasons
being hidden in the substance of the subject. And
when we subsequently recall the decision, being re­
moved from the actual (though not conceptually
perceptible) glow in which it was bathed, we may
doubt retrospectively of its prudence and even of
its freedom.
In the moral problems of which we speak, where
we are obliged to reconcile contrasting virtues or du­
ties, choice has to be made not only between good
and evil but also, and usually, between the good and
the better. It is at such a moment that we enter into
the deepest arcana of moral life and that the indi­
viduality of the moral act assumes its supreme di­
mensions. St. Thomas teaches that the standard of
the gifts of the Holy Ghost is higher than that of the
moral virtues; that of the gift of counsel is higher
than that of prudence. The saints always amaze us.
Their virtues are freer than those of a merely vir­
tuous man. Now and again, in circumstances out­
wardly alike, they act quite differently from the way
in which a merely virtuous man acts. They are in­
dulgent where he would be severe, severe where he
would be indulgent. When a saint deserts her chil­
dren or exposes them to rebellion in order to enter
into religion; when another saint allows her brother
to be assassinated at the monastery gate in order

64

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

that there be no violation of the cloister; when a
saint strips himself naked before his bishop out of
love of poverty; when another chooses to be a beg­
gar and shocks people by his vermin; when another
abandons the duties of his status in society and be­
comes a galley slave out of love of the captives;
when still another allows himself to be unjustly con­
demned rather than defend himself against a dis­
honorable accusation—they go beyond the mean.
What does that signify? They have their own kind
of mean, their own kinds of standards. But they are
valid only for each one of them. Although their
standards are higher than those of reason, it is not
because of the object taken in itself that the act
measured by their standards is better than an act
measured by the mere moral virtues; rather it is so
by the inner impetus which the saints receive from
the Spirit of God in the depths of their incommu­
nicable subjectivity, which impetus goes beyond the
measure of reason to a higher good discerned by
them alone, and to which they are called to bear
witness. This is why there would be no saintliness
in the world if all excess and all that reason judges
insensate were removed from the world. This is why
we utter something deeper than we realise when we
say of such acts that they are admirable but not im­
itable. They are not generalisable, universalisable.
They are good; indeed, they are the best of all moral
acts. But they are good only for him who does them.
We are here very far from the Kantian universal
with its morality defined by the possibility of mak­
ing the maxim of an act into a law for all men.
15. Kierkegaard’s great error, amid all his great
intuitions, was to separate and oppose as two hetero-

ACTION

65

geneous worlds the world of generality, or universal
law, and that of the unique witness (unjustifiable
at the bar of human reason ) borne by the “knight of
the faith.’ Consequently, he had to sacrifice, or at
least ‘suspend’ ethics. In reality these two worlds are
in continuity; both form part of the universe of eth­
ics, which itself is divided into typically diversified
zones according to the degree of depth of moral life.
They go from the ethical realm of animal man to
the ethical realm of spiritual man and the pneuma;
from the wholly superficial realm in which moral life
is barely moral, barely integrated by conscience and
consists in outward conformity with common opin­
ion, with the rules and tabus of the social group,
right to the extreme depths, hidden in the life
divine, where moral life is fully moral and fully in­
tegrated by conscience, by the conscience of that
spiritualis homo who judgeth all things and whom
no man judgeth.4 Not only a tragic hero like Aga­
memnon, but Abraham himself sacrificing Isaac still
belongs to the universe of ethics. Abraham, stricken
to the heart by the personal command of God and
the contradiction by which he was torn, Abraham
still had a universal law, the first of all laws: Thou
shalt worship God, the Incomprehensible, and shalt
obey Him. Abraham knew obscurely, not out of
treatises on moral theology but by the instinct of the
Holy Ghost, that the killing of his child was exempt
from the law forbidding homicide, because it was
commanded by the Master of life.5
Moreover, from the moment when ethical com­
portment is not a mere waking dream guided by the
4 Spiritualis autem judicat omnia: et ipse a nemine judi­
catur. I Corinthians II, 15.
5 Cf. Sum. theol., II-II, 64, 6, ad 1.

66

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

fear of social penalties or the concern to justify one­
self in the eyes of other men; from the moment when
man has truly crossed the threshold of moral life;
from that moment, as has already been indicated,
universal law is vitally interiorised, embowled, existentialised in the dynamism of the individual sub­
ject tending towards the ends which are of impor­
tance to him above all else. Even when a man obeys
the law as a slave to the law, because he wishes an
evil act but fears hell and the wrath of God still
more, this is not the mere logical subsuming of a par­
ticular case under a general law, the subsuming of
an anonymous act (connoting a casual anybody) un­
der a rule which lays down what everybody is held
to do. It is his own fear, his fear ravaging his con­
science, causing him to tremble lest he lose his soul,
that crushes his will to evil under the heel of the
law, and makes him identify the self, unique and
precious above all others, the self troubled and re­
bellious within the man he is, with the everyman
subjected to the universal precept.
When a man obeys the law in the manner of one
faithful to the law (because, desiring justice above
all else, he does not wish that evil act to which to­
day he is tempted and which the law forbids ), it is
his own desire, deeper and stronger than that allur­
ing attraction, his own appetite for the ends he de­
sires beyond all else and desires for himself—it is this
which harmonises his will with the law ( since it re­
mains a will to good) and makes him identify his
self with the everyman who is subject to the uni­
versal precept.
When he obeys the law as a friend of the law be­
cause the Spirit of God renders him one in spirit and
love with the Principle of the law, and does of his

ACTION

67

own accord that which the law commands, he is no
longer under the law; it is his own love, now sov­
ereign and sovereignly free, his love of his God and
his All, which causes him to obey the law that has
now become his law, the personal call by which the
word of Him he loves reaches him. This is a law in
regard to which he is no longer a self to be identified
with everyman. He is this man himself, this man an­
swering to his own name, to whom the law speaks
in his pure solitude with God.
When St. Thomas teaches us that the gifts of the
Holy Ghost are given to all because they are neces­
sary to salvation, he teaches us in the same breath
that, at certain moments and at certain depths in
the universe of ethics, each of us may have to make
the sacrifice Abraham made and exceed the bounds
of reason. (This, of course, does not mean that we
shall thus be placed in the exceptional situation and
the exceptional grandeur in which Abraham was
placed. ) And when St. Thomas teaches us, with re­
gard to the universe of ethics as a whole, and in con­
nection with the life of the practical reason and the
mere moral virtues, that there is no exercise of the
virtues without the personal judgment of prudence,
and more generally that there is no moral life with­
out the personal judgment of conscience, he teaches
us thereby that in every authentically moral act,
man, in order to apply and in applying the law, must
embody and grasp the universal in his own singular
existence, where he is alone face to face with God.
As for our contemporary atheistic existentialists,
they reject the ethical universal along with all es­
sence. They do not sacrifice it in pain and anguish,
as Kierkegaard did, knowing its value the while.
Rather they wantonly repudiate it with the pleasure

68

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

of barbarians and they know not what they do. As
a matter of fact they seem to think that if there were
a system of moral rules, those rules would apply to
particular cases automatically and of themselves.
Whence it would follow that all morality is in de­
fault. For it ought to suffice, yet does not suffice, for
a young friend of M. Sartre’s, say, who hesitates to
join the Fighting French for fear of breaking his
mamma’s heart, to consult a dictionary of precepts
of a moral system to find out what course he ought
to follow.
In a word, they imagine that morality exempts us
from conscience and substitutes its golden rules for
that flexible and delicate instrument ( which costs us
so dear) and for its invincibly personal judgment.
They imagine that morality offers that same substi­
tute also for the likewise invincibly personal judg­
ment (which is irreducible to any kind of science)
of the virtue of prudence, whose cost is still more
disquietingly high. They replace all this by the
Pythia’s chasm because they have thrown out rea­
son and make the formal element of morality con­
sist in pure liberty alone. Let the perplexed young
man go cock an ear at that hole of the oracle; his
liberty itself will tell him how to make use of liberty.
Above all, let no man give him counsel! The least
bit of advice comports the risk of causing his liberty
to wither, of preventing the handsome serpent from
crawling out of the hole. For the liberty of these phi­
losophers of liberty is singularly fragile. In uprooting
it from reason they have themselves made an inva­
lid of it. But we for our part do not fear to counsel
human liberty. Cram it with advice as much as you
like, we know that it is strong enough to digest ad­
vice and that it thrives on rational motivations which

ACTION

69

it bends as it pleases and which it alone can render
efficacious. In short, by suppressing generality and
universal law, you suppress liberty; and what you
have left is nothing but that amorphous impulse
surging out of the night which is but a false image
of liberty. Because when you suppress generality
and universal law, you suppress reason, in which lib­
erty, whole and entire, has its root® and from which
emanates in man so vast a desire that no motive in
the world and no objective solicitation, except Be­
atitude seen face to face, suffices to determine it.7
6 Totius libertatis radix est in ratione constituta. St.
Thomas, De Verit., 24, 2.
7 Cf. J. Maritata, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, Chap.
V. (‘The Thomist Idea of Liberty’).

Chapter Three
THE EXISTENT

The Subject (suppositum)

16. I have spoken of the existential (practical-ex­
istential) character of the judgment of conscience
whose truth is measured by the rightly orientated
voluntary dynamism of the subject. It is time now
to furnish a few indications concerning this very no­
tion of subject and the place it occupies in the over­
all vision of Thomist philosophy. Precisely because
of the existentialism (existentialist intellectualism)
of this philosophy, the notion of subject plays a cap­
ital part in it; we may even say that subjects occupy
all the room there is in the Thomist universe, in the
sense that, for Thomism, only subjects exist, with the
accidents which inhere in them, the action which
emanates from them, and the relations which they
bear to one another. Only individual subjects exer­
cise the act of existing.
What we call subject St. Thomas called supposi­
tum. Essence is that which a thing is; suppositum is
that which has an essence, that which exercises
existence and action—actiones sunt suppositorum—
that which subsists. Here we meet the metaphysical
notion which has given students so many headaches

THE EXISTENT

?!

and baffles everyone who has not grasped the true
—the existential—foundation of Thomist metaphys­
ics, the notion of subsistence.
We are bound to speak of this notion of subsist­
ence with great respect, not only because of the
transcendent applications made of it in theology, but
because, in the philosophical order itself, it bears
witness to the supreme tension of an articulated
thought bent on seizing intellectually something
which seems to escape from the world of notions or
ideas of the intellect, namely, the typical reality of
the subject The existential subject has this in com­
mon with the act of existing, that both transcend the
concept or the idea considered as the terminus of
the first operation of mind or simple apprehension.
I have tried to show in an earlier section how the
intellect (because it envelops itself) grasps in an
idea which is the first of its ideas, that very thing,
the act of existing, which is the intelligible ( or rather
the super-intelligible) proper to the judgment, and
not to simple apprehension. Now we are no longer
dealing with the act of existing but with that which
exercises that act. Just as there is nothing more com­
monplace in language than the word being ( and this
is the greatest mystery of philosophy) so there is
nothing more commonplace than the ‘subject’ to
which in all our propositions we attribute a pred­
icate. And when we undertake a metaphysical anal­
ysis of the reality of this subject, this individual thing
which maintains itself in existence, this supremely
concrete reality, and undertake to do justice to its
irreducible originality, we are forced to appeal to
that which is most abstract and most elaborate in
our lexicon of notions. How can we be astonished
that minds which aie fond of facility should regard

72

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

as so many vain scholastic refinements and Chinese
puzzles the elucidations in which Cajetan and John
of St. Thomas show us that subsistence is distinct
both from essence and from existence, and describe
it as a substantial mode? I concede that the style of
their dissertations seems to carry us very far from
experience into the third heaven of abstraction. And
yet, in reality their aim was to form an objective no­
tion of the subject itself or the suppositum, to reach
objectively, within the ontological analysis of the
structure of reality, the property which makes the
subject to be subject and not object, and to tran­
scend, or rather exceed in depth, the whole universe
of objects.
When they explain that an essence or a nature,
considered strictly, cannot exist outside the mind as
an object of thought, and that nevertheless individ­
ual natures do exist, and that, consequently, in order
to exist, a given nature or essence must be other than
it has to be in order to be an object of thought, that
is to say, it must bear in itself a supreme achieve­
ment which adds nothing to it in the line of its es­
sence ( and consequently does not enrich our under­
standing by any new note which qualifies it), but
which terminates it in that line of essence ( closes or
situates it, constitutes it as an in-itself or an inward­
ness face to face with existence ) in order that it may
take possession of this act of existing for which it is
created and which transcends it;1 when they explain
1 Cf. the Further Elucidations On the Notion of Subsist­
ence which I wrote for the new translation of The Degrees
of Knowledge (to be published by Scribner’s in 1957).
Here are some excerpts from this essay:
“The esse, is perceived quite precisely—even as in their
own order intellection and volition—as an exercised act,
exercised by the thing or the existent subject, or as an

THE EXISTENT

73

in this fashion that by which, on the plane of reality,
the quod which exists and acts is other than the quid
which we conceive, they attest the existential char­
acter of metaphysics, they shatter the Platonic world
of pure objects, they justify the passage into the
world of subjects or supposita, they rescue for the
metaphysical intellect the value and reality of sub­
jects.
activity in which the existent itself is engaged, an energy
that it exerts. Existence is therefore not only received, as
if by esse essences were pinned outside nothingness like a
picture hung on a wall. Existence is not only received, it
is also exercised. . . . But to exercise existence something
besides the bare essence is necessary, namely the supposit
or person. Actiones sunt suppositorum, actions are proper
to supposits, and especially and above all the act of exercis­
ing existence. In other words, to exercise existence the
essence must be completed by subsistence and thus become
a supposit. . . . Since existence by its very notion demands,
as we have just seen, that it be not only received but exer­
cised, and since this exigency, pertaining as it does to the
existential order, places us outside and beyond the order of
essence, it must be said that (substantial) essence or na­
ture can receive existence only by exercising it, which it
cannot do as long as it remains in its own essential order.
In other words, it can receive existence only on condition
of being drawn at the same time from the state of simple
essence and placed in an existential state which makes of it
a quod capable of exercising existence. This state which
completes, or rather surcompletes the essence—not at all in
the line of essence itself, but in relation to a completely
other order, the existential order—and permits the essence
(henceforth supposit) to exercise existence is precisely
subsistence. . . .
“So the proper effect of subsistence is to place the indi­
vidual nature in a state of exercising existence, with the
incommunicability proper to the individual nature. . . . This
is the promotion onto a new plane of the incommunicability
which defines singularity. Subsistence renders the essence
(become supposit) capable of existing per se separatism,
because it renders an individual nature (become supposit)
capable of exercising existence.”

74

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

17. God does not create essences to which He can
be imagined as giving a last rub of the sandpaper of
subsistence before sending them forth into exist­
ence! God creates existent subjects or supposita
which subsist in the individual nature that consti­
tutes them and which receive from the creative in­
flux their nature as well as their subsistence, their
existence, and their activity. Each of them possesses
an essence and pours itself out in action. Each is,
for us, in its individual existing reality, an inex­
haustible well of knowability. We shall never know
everything there is to know about the tiniest blade
of grass or the least ripple in a stream. In the world
of existence there are only subjects or supposita, and
that which emanates from them into being. This is
why ours is a world of nature and adventure, filled
with events, contingency, chance, and where the
course of events is flexible and mutable whereas the
laws of essence are necessary. We know those sub­
jects, we shall never get through knowing them. We
do not know them as subjects, we know them by objectising them, by achieving objective insights of
them and making them our objects; for the object is
nothing other than something of the subject trans­
ferred into the state of immaterial existence of intel­
lection in act. We know subjects not as subjects, but
as objects, and therefore only in such-and-such of
the intelligible aspects, or rather inspects, and per­
spectives in which they are rendered present to the
mind and which we shall never get through discov­
ering in them.
As we pass progressively to higher degrees in the
scale of beings we deal with subjects of existence or
supposita more and more rich in inner complexity,
whose individuality is more and more concentrated

THE EXISTENT

75

and integrated, whose action manifests a more and
more perfect spontaneity, from the merely transitive
activity of inanimate bodies to the occultly imma­
nent activity of vegetable life, the definitely imma­
nent activity of sentient life, and the perfectly im­
manent activity of the life of the intellect.2 At this
last degree the threshold of free choice is crossed,
and therewith the threshold of independence prop­
erly so-called ( however imperfect it be ) and of per­
sonality. With man, liberty of spontaneity becomes
liberty of autonomy, the suppositum becomes per­
sona, that is, a whole which subsists and exists in
virtue of the very subsistence and existence of its
spiritual soul, and acts by setting itself its own ends;
a universe in itself; a microcosm which, though
its existence at the heart of the material universe
is ceaselessly threatened, nevertheless possesses a
higher ontological density than that whole universe.
Only the person is free; only the person possesses, in
the full sense of these words, inwardness and subjec­
tivity—because it contains itself and moves about
within itself. The person, St. Thomas says, is that
which is noblest and highest in all nature.

«
Subjectivity as subjectivity

18. By sense or experience, science or philosophy,
each of us, as I said a moment ago, knows the en­
vironing world of subjects, supposita, and persons in
their rôle as objects. The paradox of consciousness
and personality is that each of us is situated precisely
2 Cf. J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, Chap.
VI (‘Spontaneity and Independence’).

76

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

at the centre of this world. Each is at the centre of
infinity. And this privileged subject, the thinking
self, is to itself not object but subject; in the midst
of all the subjects which it knows only as objects, it
alone is subject as subject. We are thus confronted
by subjectivity as subjectivity.
I know myself as subject by consciousness and re­
flexivity, but my substance is obscure to me. St.
Thomas explains that in spontaneous reflection,
which is a prerogative of the life of the intellect, each
of us knows (by a kind of knowledge that is not sci­
entific but experimental and incommunicable) that
his soul exists, knows the singular existence of this
subjectivity that perceives, suffers, loves, thinks.
When a man is awake to the intuition of being he is
awake at the same time to the intuition of subjec­
tivity; he grasps, in a flash that will never be
dimmed, the fact that he is a self, as Jean-Paul said.
The force of such a perception may be so great as
to sweep him along to that heroic asceticism of the
void and of annihilation in which he will achieve
ecstasy in the substantial existence of the self and
the presence of immensity’ of the divine Self at one
and the same time—which in my view characterises
the natural mysticism of India.3
But the intuition of subjectivity is an existential
intuition which surrenders no essence to us. We
know that which we are by our phenomena, our
operations, our flow of consciousness. The more we
grow accustomed to the inner life, the better we de­
cipher the astonishing and fluid multiplicity whic
is thus delivered to us; the more, also, we feel th
3 Cf. J. Maritain, Quatre essais sur ¡’Esprit dans sa con­
dition charnelle, Chap. HI (‘Natural Mystical Experience
and the Vacuum’).

THE EXISTENT

77

it leaves us ignorant of the essence of our self. Sub­
jectivity as subjectivity is inconceptualisable; is an
unknowable abyss. It is unknowable by the mode of
notion, concept, or representation, or by any mode
of any science whatsoever—introspection, psychol­
ogy, or philosophy. How could it be otherwise, see­
ing that every reality known through a concept, a
notion, or a representation is known as object and
not as subject? Subjectivity as such escapes by def­
inition from that which we know about ourselves by
means of notions.
19. Yet it is known in a way, or rather in certain
ways, which I should like briefly to enumerate. At
the very beginning and above all, subjectivity is
known or rather felt in virtue of a formless and dif­
fuse knowledge which, in relation to reflective con­
sciousness, we may call unconscious or pre-conscious
knowledge. This is knowledge of the ‘concomitant’
or spontaneous consciousness, which, without giving
rise to a distinct act of thought, envelops in fact, in
actu exercito, our inner world in so far as it is in­
tegrated into the vital activity of our spiritual fac­
ulties.4 Even for the most superficial persons, it is
true that from the moment when they say I, the
whole unfolding of their states of consciousness and
their operations, their musings, memories, and acts,
is subsumed by a virtual and ineffable knowledge,
a vital and existential knowledge of the totality im­
manent in each of its parts, and immersed, without
ieir troubling to become aware of it, in the diffuse
sow, the unique freshness, the maternal connivance
as it were, which emanates from subjectivity. Sub4 Cf. J. Maritain, De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, pp.
160-161.

78

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

jectivity is not known, it is felt as a propitious and
enveloping night.
There is, secondly, a knowledge of subjectivity as
such, imperfect and fragmentary of course, but in
this instance formed and actually given to the mind,
and which is thrown into relief by what St. Thomas
calls knowledge by mode of inclination, sympathy,
or connaturality, not by mode of knowledge. It ap­
pears before us under three specifically distinct
forms: (1) practical knowledge, which judges both
moral matters and the subject itself, by the inner in­
clinations of the subject. I mentioned this some
pages back in connection with moral conscience and
prudence; (2) poetic knowledge, in which subjec­
tivity and the things of this world are known to­
gether in creative intuition-emotion and are re­
vealed and expressed together, not in a word or
concept but in a created work;5 (3) mystical knowl­
edge, which is not directed towards the subject but
towards things divine, and does not of itself issue in
any expression, but in which God is known by union
and by connaturality of love, and in which this very
love that becomes the formal means of knowledge
of the divine Self, simultaneously renders the hu­
man self transparent in its spiritual depths. Let the
mystic reflect an instant upon himself, and a St.
Theresa or a St. John of the Cross will show us to
what extent the divine light gives him a lucid and
inexhaustible knowledge of his own subjectivity.
But in none of these instances is the knowledge
of subjectivity as subjectivity, however real it be, a
knowledge by mode of knowledge, which is to say,
by mode of conceptual objectisation.
5 Cf. Jacques and Rai'ssa Maritain, Situation de la poésie,
Paris, 1947.

THE EXISTENT

79

20. In none of these instances is it philosophical
knowledge. It would be a contradiction in terms to
seek to make a philosophy of that sort of knowledge,
since every philosophy—like it or not—proceeds by
concepts. This is the first point to which the consid­
eration of subjectivity as subjectivity draws our at­
tention; and it is a point of capital importance. Sub­
jectivity marks the frontier which separates the
world of philosophy from the world of religion. This
is what Kierkegaard felt so deeply in his polemic
against Hegel. Philosophy runs against an insur­
mountable barrier in attempting to deal with sub­
jectivity, because while philosophy of course knows
subjects, it knows them only as objects. Philosophy
is registered whole and entire in the relation of in­
telligence to object; whereas religion enters into the
relation of subject to subject. For this reason, every
philosophical religion, or every philosophy which,
like Hegel’s, claims to assume and integrate religion
into itself, is in the last analysis a mystification.
When philosophy, taking its start in the being of
things, attains to God as the cause of being, it has
then, thanks to ana-noetic knowledge,® rendered the
divine Self an object of philosophical knowledge ex­
pressed in concepts. These concepts do not circum­
scribe the supreme reality presented by them. On
the contrary, that divine reality infinitely overflows
the banks of conceptual knowledge. But philosophy
knows thereby, or ought to know, that the reality
thus objectised ‘through a glass, darkly,’ is the reality
of a transcendent Self inscrutable in its being and
its goodness, in its liberty and its glory. And all the
other intelligent selves who know it, from the in6 Cf. Les Degrés du savoir, pp. 432-447, Eng. trans., pp.
268-278.

8o

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

stant that they do know it, owe to it, as their first
duty, obedience and adoration. St. Paul blamed pa­
gan wisdom for not recognising that glory of God of
which it was in fact aware. But in fact, to recognise
that glory is already to adore it. It is something to
know that God is a transcendent and sovereign
Self; but it is something else again to enter oneself
and with all one’s baggage—one’s own existence and
flesh and blood—into the vital relationship in which
created subjectivity is brought face to face with this
transcendent subjectivity and, trembling and loving,
looks to it for salvation. This is the business of re­
ligion.
Religion is essentially that which no philosophy
can be: a relation of person to person with all the
risk, the mystery, the dread, the confidence, the de­
light, and the torment that lie in such a relationship.
And this very relationship of subject to subject7 de­
mands that into the knowledge of uncreated subjec­
tivity which the created subjectivity possesses there
shall be transferred something of that which the lat­
ter is as subjectivity, i.e., as that uncreated subjectiv­
ity is in the mystery of its personal life. Whence all
religion comports an element of revelation. There­
fore in the true faith it is the First Truth in Per­
son which makes known to man the mystery of
the divine subjectivity: unigenitus filius, qui est
7 Is it necessary to explain that when we employ the word
subject in speaking of God, we do not do so in the sense
in which this word signifies receptivity as regards forms or
accidents (for in this sense God is obviously not a ‘subject’:
cf. Sum. theol., I, q. 3, a. 6 and 7), but in the sense in
which, as the moderns employ it, the word signifies sub­
sistence and Self. In this circumstance the word subject is
like the word hypostasis which has a similar etymology and
which is predicated formally-eminently of God (cf. Sum.
theol., I, q. 29, a. 3 ).

THE EXISTENT

8i

in sinu patris, ipse enarravit.8 This knowledge is still
‘through a glass, darkly,’ and therein the divine sub­
jectivity is still objectised in order to be grasped by
us. But this time it is in the glass of the super-analogy
of faith,9 in concepts which God Himself has chosen
as His means of speaking to us about Himself—un­
til at the last every glass falls away and then we
know truly as we are known. Then shall we truly
know the divine subjectivity as subjectivity in the
vision in which the divine essence itself actuates our
intellect and transports us in ecstasy within itself.
While awaiting this state, the connaturality of love
gives us, in apophatic contemplation, a dim sort of
substitute and obscure foretaste of such a union.
21. Generally speaking, to situate the privileged
subject which knows itself as subject in respect of all
other subjects, which it knows as objects; to situate
the self, that thinking reed in tire crowd of thinking
reeds, sets a singular problem. Each of us is able to
say with Mr. Somerset Maugham: ‘To myself I am
the most important person in the world; though I do
not forget that, not even taking into consideration so
grand a conception as the Absolute, but from the
standpoint of common sense, I am of no consequence
whatever. It would have made small difference to
the universe if I had never existed.’10 This is a simple
remark; but its implications are very wide.
Being the only subject which is a subject for me in
the midst of a world of subjects which my senses
and my intelligence can know only as objects, I am
8 John I, i8.
9 Cf. Les Degrés du savoir, pp. 478-484, Eng. trans., pp.
297-301.
10 W. Somerset Maugham, The Summing Up, 1938, § 5.

82

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

at the centre of the world, as we observed a moment
ago. With regard to my subjectivity in act, I am the
centre of the world (‘the most important person in
the world’). My destiny is the most important of all
destinies. Worthless as I know myself to be, I am
more interesting than all the saints. There is me, and
there are ah the others. Whatever happens to the
others is a mere incident in the picture; but what
happens to me, what I myself have to do, is of ab­
solute importance.
And yet, as regards the world itself, from the most
obvious ‘standpoint of common sense,’ I know per­
fectly well that 1 am of no consequence whatever
and that ‘it would have made small difference to the
universe if I had never existed.’ I know that I am
one of the herd, not better than the rest, worth no
more than the rest. I shall have been a tiny crest
of foam, here one moment, gone in the twinkling of
an eye, on the ocean of nature and humanity.
These two images—of myself and of my situation
in respect of other subjects—can positively not be
superposed. These two perspectives cannot be made
to coincide. I oscillate rather miserably between
them. If I abandon myself to the perspective of sub­
jectivity, I absorb everything into myself, and, sacri­
ficing everything to my uniqueness, I am riveted to
the absolute of selfishness and pride. If I abandon
myself to the perspective of objectivity, I am ab­
sorbed into everything, and, dissolving into the
world, I am false to my uniqueness and resign my
destiny. It is only from above that the antinomy can
be resolved. If God exists, then not I, but He is the
centre; and this time not in relation to a certain par­
ticular perspective, like that in which each created
subjectivity is the centre of the universe it knows,

THE EXISTENT

83

but speaking absolutely, and as transcendent subjec­
tivity to which all subjectivities are referred. At such
time I can know both that I am without importance
and that my destiny is of the highest importance. I
can know this without falling into pride, know it
without being false to my uniqueness. Because, lov­
ing the divine Subject more than myself, it is for Him
that I love myself, it is to do as He wishes that I
wish above all else to accomplish my destiny; and
because, unimportant as I am in the world, I am im­
portant to Him; not only I, but all the other sub­
jectivities whose lovableness is revealed in Him and
for Him and which are henceforward, together with
me, a we, called to rejoice in His life.

22. I am known to other men. They know me as
object, not as subject. They are unaware of my sub­
jectivity as such; unaware not merely of its inex­
haustible depth, but also of that presence of the
whole in each of its operations, that existential com­
plexity of inner circumstances, data of nature, free
choice, attractions, weaknesses, virtues perhaps,
loves and pains; that atmosphere of immanent vital­
ity which alone lends meaning to each of my acts.
To be known as object, to be known to others, to see
oneself in the eyes of one’s neighbour (here M.
Sartre is right) is to be severed from oneself and
wounded in one’s identity. It is to be always unjustly
known—whether the he whom they see condemns
the I, or whether, as occurs more rarely, the ‘he’ does
honour to the T.’ A tribunal is a masquerade where
the accused stands accoutered in a travesty of him­
self, and it delivers his acts to be weighed in the
balance. The more the judges stray from the crude
outward criteria with which formerly they contented

84

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

themselves, and strive to take account of degrees of
inner responsibility, the more they reveal that the
truth of him whom they judge remains unknowable
to human justice. Interrogated by such a tribunal,
Jesus owed it to Himself to remain silent.
I am known to God. He knows all of me, me as
subject. I am present to Him in my subjectivity it­
self; He has no need to objectise me in order to know
me. Then, and in this unique instance, man is known
not as object but as subject in all the depth and all
the recesses of subjectivity. Only God knows me in
this wise; to Him alone am I uncovered. I am not
uncovered to myself. The more I know of my sub­
jectivity, the more it remains obscure to me. If I
were not known to God, no one would know me.
No one would know me in my truth, in my own ex­
istence. No one would know me—me—as subject.
What this comes to is that no one would render
justice to my being.11 There could be no justice for
me anywhere. My existence would be immersed in
the injustice of the knowledge of me possessed by all
the others and by the world itself; and in my own
ignorance of myself. But if there is no justice possible
with regard to my being, then there is no possible
hope for me. If man is not known to God, and if he
has the profound experience of his personal exist­
ence and his subjectivity, then he has also the exII ‘ “You’re tying yourself up more and more,” said the
Head Waiter. “If we’re to believe you, we’ve got to keep
forgetting what you said before.”. . .
‘ “It’s impossible to defend oneself where there is no good
will,” Karl told himself, and he made no further answer. . ..
He knew that all he could say would appear quite different
to the others, and that whether a good or a bad construc­
tion was to be put on his actions depended alone on the
spirit in which he was judged.’ Franz Kafka, Amerika, New
York, 1946, p. X74 (English translation by Edwin Muir).

THE EXISTENT

85

perience of his desperate solitude; and the longing
for death—more than this, the aspiration to total an­
nihilation, is the sole spring that can gush forth
within him.
Finally, to know that I am known as subject in all
the dimensions of my being is not only to know that
my truth is known, and that in this knowledge jus­
tice is done me; it is also to know that I am under­
stood. Even though God condemn me, I know that
He understands me. The idea that we are known to
Him who scrutinises the loins and the heart dissolves
us at first in fear and trembling because of the evil
that is within us. But on deeper reflection, how can
we keep from thinking that God Who knows us and
knows all those poor beings who jostle us and whom
we know as objects, whose wretchedness we mostly
perceive—how can we keep from thinking that God
Who knows all these in their subjectivity, in the
nakedness of their wounds and their secret evil,
must know also the secret beauty of that nature
which He has bestowed upon them, the slightest
sparks of good and liberty they give forth, all the
travail and the impulses of good-will that they drag
from the womb to the grave, the recesses of goodness
of which they themselves have no notion? The ex­
haustive knowledge possessed by God is a loving
knowledge. To know that we are known to God is
not merely to experience justice, it is also to expe­
rience mercy.

23. In any case, what I should like to say is that
our acts are tolerable to ourselves only because our
consciousness of them is immersed in the obscure ex­
perience of subjectivity. Our acts are hatched in it as
in a nest where everything, even the worst rendings

86

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

and the worst shames, connives with us to emanate
from us in the unique freshness of the present instant
that we are living. They bathe in that maternal at­
mosphere emanating from subjectivity, of which I
spoke earlier. There is nothing which crushes us so
much as our own acts when, forgotten and then one
day evoked by some relic of past time, they pass to
the state of objects, separated from the living waters
of subjectivity. Even if they were not specifically
evil, we are no longer sure that they were good and
that some unknown illusion or hidden impurity had
not tainted them—those strangers who fling them­
selves upon us like the dead come forth from within
to bring doubt and death to us.
It must be one of the natural features of the state
of damnation that the subject, not seeing himself in
God, and therefore not seeing his whole life in the
eternal instant to which everything is present, all his
good and evil acts come back upon him in the sterile
endlessly questioning light of the memory of the
dead, like enemy objects wholly detached from the
actual existence in which subjectivity is definitively
set, in the solitude of its ill-will which renders its own
past a separate thing for it.
But when the subject reaches his end and sees
himself in God and in divine eternity, all the mo­
ments of his past life are known to him in the actual­
ity and the presentness of the instant in which they
were lived, and all his acts ( even the evil, now not
only forgiven but leaving no spot nor shadow) are
known as emanating presently out of the freshness
of subjectivity, now itself become trans-luminous.
And in the virtue of the vision in which his intelli­
gence possesses the Ipsum esse subsistens he knows
not only himself and all his life in a sovereignly ex­

THE EXISTENT

87

istential manner, but also the other creatures whom
in God he knows at last as subjects in the unveiled
depth of their being.

The Structure of the Subject

24. To objectise is to universalise. The intelligibles
in which a subject objectises itself for our mind are
universal natures. It is in relation to the individuality
itself of the subject (which the intelligence is not
capable of grasping directly); in relation to its sub­
jectivity as subjectivity, as something unique and
singular, incommunicable and unconceptualisable,
and in relation also to the subject’s own experience
of its own subjectivity, that objectisation is false to
the subject and that, known as object, it is unjustly
known, as we have already observed. On the other
hand, in relation to its essential structures, the sub­
ject is in no wise betrayed when it is made object.
The objectisation which universalises it and discerns
in it intelligible natures, makes it known by a knowl­
edge destined doubtless to continue to deepen, but
not one that is in any sense unjust. Such a knowledge
does no violence to the truth of the subject, but ren­
ders that truth present to the mind.
The subject, or suppositum, or person has an
essence, an essential structure. It is a substance
equipped with properties and which is acted upon
and acts by the instrumentality of its potencies. The
person is a substance whose substantial form is a
spiritual soul; a substance which lives a life that is
not merely biological and instinctive, but is also a
life of intellect and will. It is a very simple-minded
error to believe that subjectivity possesses no intelli­

88

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

gible structure, on the ground that it is an inex­
haustible depth; and to conceive of it as without
any nature whatsoever for the purpose of making
of it an absurd abyss of pure and formless liberty.
These observations allow us to understand why
many contemporary philosophers, while they talk of
nothing but person and subjectivity, nevertheless
radically misunderstand those words. They remain
lightheartedly ignorant of the metaphysical prob­
lem of that subsistence concerning which something
was said in a preceding section. They do not see that
personality, metaphysically considered, being the
subsistence of the spiritual soul communicated to the
human composite, and enabling the latter to possess
its existence, to perfect itself and to give itself freely,
bears witness in us to the generosity or expansivity
of being which, in an incarnate spirit, proceeds from
the spirit and which constitutes, in the secret springs
of our ontological structure, a source of dynamic
unity and unification from within.12
Because analysis wearies them, they are ignorant
of what the proper life of the intelligence consists in,
and in what the proper life of the will consists. They
do not see that, because his spirit makes man cross
the threshold of independence properly so-called,
and of self-inwardness, the subjectivity of the person
demands as its most intimate privilege communica­
tions proper to love and intelligence. They do not
see that, even before the exercise of free choice, and
in order to make free choice possible, the most
deeply rooted need of the person is to communicate
with the other by the union of the intelligence, and
12 Cf. J. Maritain, La Personne et le Bien commun, Paris,
1947, p. 34 (Eng. trans., N. Y., 1947, p. 31).

THE EXISTENT

89

with others by the affective union. Their subjectivity
is not a self, because it is wholly phenomenal.

25. I have already cited St. Thomas’s aphorism,
that the whole root of liberty is established in the
reason. What reveals subjectivity to itself is not an
irrational break (however profound and gratuitous
it may be ) in an irrational flow of moral and psycho­
logical phenomena, of dreams, automatisms, urges,
and images surging upwards from the unconscious.
Neither is it the anguish of forced choice. It is selfmastery for the purpose of self-giving. When a man
has the obscure intuition of subjectivity, the reality,
whose sudden invasion of his consciousness he expe­
riences, is that of a secret totality, which contains
both itself and its upsurge, and which superabounds
in knowledge and in love. Only by love does it at­
tain to its supreme level of existence—existence as
self-giving.
‘This is what I mean: Self-knowledge as a mere
psychological analysis of phenomena more or less
superficial, a wandering through images and mem­
ories, is but an egotistic awareness, however valuable
it may be. But when it becomes ontological, then
knowledge of the Self is transfigured, implying intui­
tion of Being and the discovery of the actual abyss of
subjectivity. At the same time, it is the discovery of
the basic generosity of existence. Subjectivity, this
essentially dynamic, living and open centre, both re­
ceives and gives. It receives through the intellect, by
superexisting in knowledge. It gives through the
will, by superexisting in love; that is, by having
within itself other beings as inner attractions di­
rected towards them and giving oneself to them, and
by spiritually existing in the maimer of a gift. And

90

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

“it is better to give than to receive.” The spiritual ex­
istence of love is the supreme revelation of existence
for the Self. The Self, being not only a material in­
dividual but also a spiritual personality, possesses it­
self and holds itself in hand in so far as it is spiritual
and in so far as it is free. And to what purpose does
it possess itself and dispose of itself, if not for what
is better, in actual existence and absolutely speaking,
or to give of itself? Thus it is that when a man has
been really awakened to the sense of being or exist­
ence, and grasps intuitively the obscure, living depth
of the Self and subjectivity, he discovers by the same
token the basic generosity of existence and realises,
by virtue of the inner dynamism of this intuition,
that love is not a passing pleasure or emotion, but
the very meaning of his being alive.’13
By love, finally, is shattered the impossibility of
knowing another except as object. I have empha­
sised this impossibility above at length and noted
that it directly concerns the senses and the intellect.
To say that union in love makes the being we love
another ourself for us is to say that it makes that be­
ing another subjectivity for us, another subjectivity
that is ours. To the degree that we truly love (which
is to say, not for ourselves but for the beloved; and
when—which is not always the case—the intellect
within us becomes passive as regards love, and, al­
lowing its concepts to slumber, thereby renders love
a formal means of knowledge), to this degree we
acquire an obscure knowledge of the being we love,
similar to that which we possess of ourselves; we
13 Cf. J. Maritain, ‘A New Approach to God,’ in Our
Emergent Civilization, ed. by Ruth Nanda Anshen, Harper
& Bros., N. Y., 1947, pp. 285-286. By permission of the pub­
lishers.

THE EXISTENT

91

know that being in his very subjectivity ( at least in
a certain measure) by this experience of union.
Then he himself is, in a certain degree, cured of his
solitude; he can, though still disquieted, rest for a
moment in the nest of the knowledge that we pos­
sess of him as subject.

Chapter Four

THE FREE EXISTENT AND
THE FREE ETERNALPURPOS E S

Time and Eternity
26. Linked to the considerations which held our
attention in the preceding chapter ( those considera­
tions concerning the subject, the existent, the sup­
positum which possesses or exercises existence ) is a
problem, or rather the highest and most awesome
mystery, with which the sciences that ‘lisp of things
divine’ have to deal, namely, the problem of the rela­
tion between the liberty of the created existent and
the eternal purposes of uncreated Liberty. That
problem is of particular concern to theology. The
theologian states it in terms of predestination to glory
and reprobation, of sufficient grace and efficacious
grace, of antecedent divine will and consequent di­
vine will. It also concerns metaphysics, in a certain
manner. For already in the natural order, the ques­
tion of the relation between these two liberties
arises. And for metaphysics it seems to me to pre­
sent itself first of all in the following terms: What is
the situation of man and of his fallible liberty in face
of the absolutely free and absolutely immutable eter­
nal plan established by the Uncreated in respect of
the created? It is from this point of view that I shall

THE FREE EXISTENT

93

deal with it here by summarising as briefly as I can
my reflections upon Thomist principles continued
over many years. In order to make as clear as pos­
sible an exposition in which many and divers ques­
tions influence one another reciprocally, I must clas­
sify the points of which I shall treat under a certain
number of considerations.
First consideration: Relation between time and
eternity. Each moment of time is present to divine
eternity not only as being known to it, but ‘physi­
cally’ or in its being itself. John of St. Thomas has
established his master’s doctrine on this point very
clearly.1 All the moments of time are present to di­
vine eternity—in which there is no succession, and
which is an instant that endures without beginning
or end—because the creative ideas embrace accord­
ing to their own measure, which is eternity and
which infinitely transcends time, the created beings
which they cause to be, the proper measure of which
is the succession of time. ‘This divine to-day is the
incommutable, indefeasible, inaccessible eternity to
which nothing can be added, from which nothing
can be taken away. And all things which here below
supervene upon and succeed one another by flowing
progressively into non-being, and which are diversi­
fied according to the vicissitudes of their times, are
present before this to-day and continue to exist mo­
tionless before it. In that to-day, the day when the
world began is still immutable. And nevertheless,
1 Joannis a S. Thoma, Cursus Theologicus, (Vivès ed.
Paris, 1883-1886) Tome II, Quaest. X, Disp. 9, Art. 3, pp.
80-102; (Solesmes ed. Paris, 1931-) Tome II. In Quaest. X.
lae P., Disp. 9, Art. 3, pp. 64-80.

94

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

the day is already present also when it will be
judged by the eternal judge.’2
Eternity contains and measures all time by pos­
sessing it in an indivisible manner. Thus any future
event, which in itself and in its own duration does
not yet exist, is already actually present in eternity
with all the events that preceded it and all the
events that will follow it. They are all there as terms
of the creative action which, without a shadow of
succession, causes them to occur successively and as
indivisibly possessed and measured by the eternal
instant which is the duration belonging properly to
that action. There is no future thing for God.3
It follows from this that, properly speaking, God
does not foresee the things of time, he sees them;
and he sees in particular the free options and deci­
sions of the created existent which, in as much as
they are free, are absolutely unforeseeable. He sees
them in the very instant when they take place, in
the pure existential freshness of their emergence
into being, in the humility of their own instant of
coming forth.

The Line of Good and the Line of Evil

27. Second consideration: Liberty of the created
existent and the line of good. If it is true, as has been
said in a preceding section, that no created cause
acts unless by virtue of the super-causality of the
Ipsum esse per se subsistens, if it is also true that
freedom of choice consists in the active and dominat2 St. Peter Damien, Opusculum De Divina Omnipotentia,
cap. 8. P.L. 145,607.
3 Cf. St. Thomas. In I Dist. 38, q. 1, art. 5.

THE FREE EXISTENT

95

ing indétermination of the will which itself renders
efficacious the motive which determines it, then it
is clear that the liberty of the created existent can
be exercised only if it is activated or moved, pen­
etrated to its depths and in the integrity of its de­
terminations, by the influx of transcendent causality
by which creative Liberty moves each created ex­
istent to act according to its own mode. That is to
say, it activates to act necessarily, those which are
subject to necessary determinations, contingently
those which are subject to contingent determina­
tions, and freely those whose act is subject to no sort
of determination at all, unless it be that which it be­
stows upon itself.
There is no difficulty here that can obstruct
thought, so long as the mind maintains itself in an
existential perspective and provided it knows what
transcendence and analogy mean. Consequently, in
the existential subordination of causes, the created
existent possesses the whole initiative of good, but
this initiative is second; creative Liberty possesses
the whole initiative of good and its initiative is first.
There is not in the world a shadow of beauty, a trace
of actuality, a spark of being of which the subsistent
Being itself is not the author. The more so where it
is a question of that singular nobility and ultimate
flowering of being which is the morally good act of
the free will.
Metaphysics, therefore, would not find itself faced
with any major difficulty if the created existent al­
ways exercised its liberty in the line of good. But we
know well enough that this is not the case.
28. Third consideration: Dissymmetry between
the line of good and the line of evil. This dissymme­

96

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

try consists in the fact that whatever concerns the
Ene of good is presented in terms of being, whereas
whatever concerns the Ene of evil (I do not say, of
evil action, for every action, in so far as it comports
act or being, contains [metaphysical] good) what­
ever concerns the line of evil as such is presented in
terms of non-being, of nothingness or of nihilation.
For evil as such is a privation, that is to say, not only
a mere absence of a good, a mere lacuna, or any
sort of nothingness, but the absence of a due good,
the nothingness of a form of being requisite to a
given being; and the evil of the free act is the priva­
tion of due ruling0 and form. This is what vitiates
and wounds with nothingness, the use of Eberty in
the free act.
It foUows from this that we cannot reason about
the Ene of evil in the same way as we do about the
Ene of good, nor can we apply indiscriminately to
the former theses estabhshed in relation to the latter.
The perspective has to be reversed; we have to think
in terms of nihil instead of thinking in terms of esse.

29. Fourth consideration: Liberty of the created
existent and the line of evil. What is the metaphysi­
cal root or pre-condition of evil in the free act? If
that act is evil, that is to say wounded or corroded
by nothingness, the reason is that before producing
it, the will from which it emanates has already in
some fashion withdrawn from being. It has done this
freely, but without having as yet acted, or acted
evilly (otherwise we should be in a vicious circle,
and the fissure which we are seeking, through which
0 In the sense in which we call bad conduct ‘unruly’ be­
cause it lacks conformity to the appropriate ‘rule.’—Trans­
lator’s Note.

THE FREE EXISTENT

97

evil introduces itself into the free act, and makes it
evil, would already be a wicked act).
In one of his most difficult and most original
theses, Thomas Aquinas explains4 on this point that
the emergence of a free and evil act resolves into
two moments—distinct, not according to the priority
of time, but according to an ontological priority. At
a first moment there is in the will, by the fact of its
very liberty, an absence or a nihilation which is not
yet a privation or an evil, but a mere lacuna: the
existent does not consider the norm of the thou
shouldst upon which the ruling of the act depends.
At a second moment the will produces its free act
affected by the privation of its due ruling and
wounded with the nothingness which results from
this lack of consideration.
It is at this second moment that there is moral evil
or sin. At the first moment there had not yet been
moral fault or sin, but only the fissure through which
evil introduces itself into the free decision about to
come forth from the person, the vacuum or lacuna
through which sin will take form in the free will be­
fore being launched into the arteries of the subject
and of the world. This vacuum or lacuna, which St.
Thomas calls non-consideration of the rule, is not an
evil or a privation, but a mere lack, a mere nothing­
ness of consideration. For of itself, it is not a duty for
the will to consider the rule; that duty arises only at
the moment of action, of production of being, at
which time the will begets the free decision in which
it makes its choice. Non-consideration of the rule be­
comes an evil, or becomes the privation of a good
4 Cf. J. Maritain, St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil,
The Aquinas Lectures, Milwaukee, 1942. (French text in
De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, Chap. VII.)

98

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

that is due, only at the second of the two moments
we have distinguished—at the moment when the
will produces some act or some being; at the moment
when it causes the choice to irrupt; at the moment
when the free act is posited, with the wound or de­
formity of that non-consideration.
And still, without as yet being an evil or a fault,
that vacuum or lacuna, that non-consideration of the
rule, was already free; for it depends upon the free­
dom of the will to look or not to look at the rule. The
will has not acted, has not looked. And St. Thomas
says that the freedom of the will sufficiently accounts
for the fact that the will has not looked at the rule
and there is no need to seek farther. Ad hoc sufficit
ipsa libertas voluntatis.5 We are faced here by an
absolute beginning which is not a beginning but a
‘naught,’ a fissure, a lacuna introduced into the warp
and woof of being. And we must henceforward do
violence to all the words in the language, for they
are all constructed in function of being and yet must
now be related, in an inevitably paradoxical form,
to the domain and the works of non-being and noth­
ingness. The first cause (which is not an acting or
efficient cause, but is dis-acting and de-efficient),
the first cause of the non-consideration of the rule,
and consequently of the evil of the free act that will
come forth from it, is purely and simply the liberty
of the created existent.6 The latter possesses the free
initiative of an absence (or ‘nothingness’) of con­
sideration, of a vacuum introduced into the warp
and woof of being, of a nihil; and this time this free
5 De Malo, q. i, a. 3.
6 Cf. Sum. theol., I-II, 79, 2, ad 2-. ‘Homo est causa pec­
cati’; and, Ibid., 112, 3, ad 2: ‘Defectus gratiae prima causa
est ex nobis.’

THE FREE EXISTENT

99

initiative is a first initiative because it does not con­
sist in acting freely or allowing being to pass, but in
freely not-acting and not-willing, in freely frustrat­
ing the passage of being.
It follows from this that whereas the created exist­
ent is never alone when it exercises its liberty in the
line of good, and has need of the first cause for all
that it produces in the way of being and of good,
contrariwise, it has no need of God, it is truly alone,
for the purpose of freely nihilating, of taking the free
first initiative of this absence (or nothingness’) of
consideration, which is the matrix of the evil in the
free act—I mean to say, the matrix of the privation
itself by which the free act ( in which there is meta­
physical good in so far as there is being) is morally
deformed or purely and simply evil. ‘For without
Me, you can do nothing’;7 which is to say, ‘Without
Me you can make that thing which is nothing.’

The Divine Activations

30. Fifth consideration: Shatterable divine acti­
vations and unshatterable divine activations. I have
spoken of a void or vacuum introduced into the warp
and woof of being. The reason is that I was consider­
ing the created existent as traversed and activated
by all the influxes of being which derive from the
Ipsum esse subsistens (whether they activate the
created existent by whatsoever in the world incites
to good in any way at all, or whether they activate
it directly, as inspiration received from God by way
of the intellect and the will, or as an impetus from
John XV, 5.

100

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

the perpetual divine irradiation which prompts free­
dom to good acts). These influxes tend in each ex­
istent to bear it forward to the fulness of its being.
If it nihilates under their touch, if it non-acts, if it
adopts the free initiative of non-consideration, that
initiative creates a vacuum in the warp and woof of
being or of the influxes which are the bearers of be­
ing. In such case the existent frustrates, nihilates,
renders sterile—not actively, but by way of non-act­
ing—the divine activations which it has received.
Therefore if, in the world, we find moral evil and
free evil acts, the reason is that there are shatterable
divine activations. In other words, the reason is that
the First Cause sends down into free existents acti­
vations or motions which contain within themselves,
in advance, the permission or possibility of being
rendered sterile if the free existent which receives
them takes the first initiative of evading them, of
not-acting and not-considering, or nihilating under
their touch. And if it is true that every created lib­
erty is by nature a fallible liberty8 ( since it is not its
own rule ), if it is true that God activates all things,
each according to its own mode, if it is true that
creative Liberty, therefore, activates created liber­
ties according to the fallible mode proper to them,
then we can understand that, in accordance with the
natural order of things, before the unshatterable di­
vine activation, by which the will to good of creative
Liberty infallibly produces its effect in the created
will, the divine activations received by the free ex­
istent must first be shatterable activations.
It depends solely upon ourselves to shatter them
by making, upon our own deficient initiative, that
8 Cf. Sum. theol., I, 63, 1.

THE FREE EXISTENT

101

thing called nothing (or by nihilating). But if we
have not budged, if we have done nothing, that is to
say, if we have introduced no nothingness and no
non; if we allow free passage to these influxes of be­
ing, then (and by virtue of the first design of God)
the shatterable divine activations fructify by them­
selves into the unshatterable divine activation. This
unshatterable divine activation is none other than
the decisive fiat, received in us. By Its fiat the tran­
scendent Cause makes that to happen which It wills.
By virtue of that unshatterable divine activation, our
will, this time, unfailingly exercises its liberty in the
fine of good, produces the good act (vitally conso­
nant with the rule or the thou shouldst) towards
which tended not only all the activations to good re­
ceived by the will, but also everything that is good
in the will’s own inner dynamism, as well as in the
fundamental aspiration of its nature.8 This good act
9 In as much as the metaphysical substructure here pre­
sented may be of some interest to theologians, perhaps it
will not be fruitless to define its significance more precisely.
God, the sole agent (other than itself) by which the will
can be moved, being the First Cause of all the good pro­
duced by created liberty, and His causality not being
frustrable, it is clear that no good act, dependent in any way
upon the freedom of the will, can come into existence with­
out an unshatterable divine motion. But created liberty
being by nature a fallible liberty, we see also that the un­
shatterable transcendent impetus must normally be preceded
by a shatterable transcendent impetus ( not to speak of
activations of all sorts which pass through creatures,—exhor­
tations, good examples, etc., which we classify, also, as
shatterable activations); and this shatterable impetus (which
s like a streak of the vivifying radiance in which the
created will is immersed ) fructifies of itself ( when it is not
shattered by free nihilating) in the unshatterable motion to
which it is ordained and towards which it tends. Therefore,
either it is shattered by the nihilating of the free will, or it
fructifies in an unshatterable impetus.

102

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

was willed by God; He was the first to will it; and
He moved the will to produce it freely under an unshatterable activation. As I remarked above, the first
initiative of this act comes entirely from God and
The shatterable and the unshatterable impetus which
activate either fallibly or infallibly any determined act, differ
by their moral finality from the general motion by which
divine causality universally activates beings, and particu­
larly the physical dynamism of the will.
From the very fact that it is decisive and unconditioned,
the unshatterable transcendent impetus is specifically dif­
ferent from the tendential and shatterable transcendent im­
petus which precedes it (precedes, at least, according to
the priority of nature). Now if, in the very instant when
its dynamism passes into exercise, the free will has not
nihilated under the influx of the shatterable impetus, at that
very instant, the latter gives way to the unshatterable im­
petus in which it fructifies and in which, activated by the
unshatterable impetus, the free will projects into existence
something morally good. According to this metaphysical
analysis, the distinction between shatterable and unshatter­
able impetus concerns all the phases of the dynamism of the
free will, which can produce nothing good except under
the influx of an unshatterable impetus.
In the light of what has just been said it is clear that, if
we consider what is most important in this dynamism,
namely, the act itself of free choice or election, we can give
the name of shatterable impetus to everything that prepares
the way for it, including the good acts which, while arising
out of free will, are not yet election (for example, every­
thing good that falls within the deliberation which precedes
election). We will then reserve the name of ‘unshatterable
impetus’ for that impetus which produces the good election.
What is more, if we consider a given act which is espe­
cially important, (either because of its difficulty or because
of its decisive rôle in the life and destiny of the subject)
we may call ‘shatterable impetus’ all that precedes it, includ­
ing all the good acts of free choice, which built a path
leading to it. In this case we will reserve the name ‘un­
shatterable impetus’ for that impetus which causes the pro­
duction of this especially important good choice of election.
The fact remains that, just as nothing in the physical ac­
tivity of creatures passes into act without the general mo­
tion of God, so no morally good act is produced by the free

THE FREE EXISTENT

IO3

from creative Liberty, exactly as the second initia­
tive comes entirely from created liberty. The least
good act of created liberty is first of all willed by
God and it is entirely caused by Him as first cause.
will without an unshatterable divine impetus. Besides, we
see also that shatterable impetus, from the fact that either
it is shattered by free nihilating or it makes way for un­
shatterable impetus, can never by itself give the to-do or
the to-act, but only the to-be-able to do, the proximate
power to do the good act.
And yet, being divine motion or activation, it cannot fail
to produce an effect in the creature that receives it; and it
cannot fail to produce it infallibly (which is nothing
else than to say that God really acts upon His creature).
But what is this effect immediately produced in the
creature by the shatterable impetus? According to a cur­
rently approved theological opinion, it is a certain mor­
ally good act in regard to which the divine activation is
efficacious and unshatterable and which gives the to-act
and the to-do, while at the same time it remains merely a
sufficient, or shatterable impetus ( giving only the to-be-able
to do ) in respect of another moral act, which is higher and
ulterior. Thus a grace or an impetus efficacious with regard
to a certain direct term (attrition, for example) will be
merely sufficient with regard to an ulterior term (say, con­
version). And if this merely sufficient grace with regard to
conversion be not sterilised by failure in the created existent
(which itself supposes a permissive decree of God) it will
make way for an efficacious grace with regard to conversion,
but one which in its turn will be merely sufficient with
regard to another ulterior term (say, perseverance).
In the perspective of our analyses we have to look upon
these things differently. The immediate effect (infallibly
produced in the creature) of what we call shatterable im­
petus is not a morally good act, but the movement itself,
the tendential actuation (impetus as received) of which that
act is the final term. And, as we shall attempt to explain
below, this entitas vialis which traverses the created will
may be frustrated ( by free nihilating ) of its proximate term
—frustrated at least in the order of specification (considera­
tion of the rule)—and consequently of its final term (the
morally good act to be produced). Thus the shatterable
impulse is conceived as giving ( dynamically ) the ability to
act (for moral good), but as not, in any respect, giving the

104

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

I do not deny (but this lies outside the purely
metaphysical considerations within which I intend
to remain) that God can, if He so wills, transport a
created existent at one stroke to the performing of a
moral to-act and to-do. And it is conceived as shatterable
in relation to the good act itself to be produced by free
will. Further it is conceived as ordained of itself, not pre­
cisely to the act to be produced by the created will, but
rather to the unshatterable impetus itself which will cause
that act to be produced and for which the shatterable
impetus, if it was not shattered by free nihilating, will make
way, as the flower makes way for the fruit, the seed sown
in the earth for the wheat, the betrothal for the consum­
mated union. Thus we would conceive a shatterable im­
petus to attrition which, if it be not shattered by free
nihilating, fructifies and vanishes into the unshatterable im­
petus by virtue of which is produced the act of attrition,
and which is followed by a shatterable impetus to conver­
sion, which in its turn, if it be not shattered, will make way
for an unshatterable impetus by virtue of which the act of
conversion will be produced and which will be succeeded
by a shatterable impetus to perseverance, and so on.
In any case it is in this way, namely, as shatterable in
relation to the morally good act itself to be produced by
free will, that we must conceive the shatterable impetus
envisaged in our analysis of the act of freedom. Keeping in
mind the two moments distinguished by St. Thomas in the
genesis of the evil act, this is how the explanation of this
essential point appears to us in the present state of our
reflections.
The shatterable impetus tends of itself towards a final
term which will take place at the second moment (with
which we enter into the order of moral good and evil) and
which will be the morally good act to be produced under
consideration of the rule. And it tends of itself towards a
direct or proximate term which will take place at the first
moment (where we are still in the merely physical order)
and which will be the free application of the intellect to
the consideration of the rule (without the act of option
being as yet produced).
The effect that the shatterable impetus produces (in­
fallibly) in the created will is tendential actuation, the
movement or impulse which traverses the will and which
has as its direct and proximate term, as I have just said,

THE FREE EXISTENT

IOS

good free act by an unshatterable or infallibly effica­
cious activation or motion. This is a question of His
free predilections and of the price paid for souls in
the communion of the saints. How far His own wisthe action by which the will moves the intellect to consider
the rule at this first moment (where there is still neither
moral good nor moral evil). Each time that a first agent
or principal agent moves a second agent or instrument, the
latter is traversed by an entitas vialis like this, i.e., a tran­
sient and tendential actuation of this sort. But in the
unique case where the second agent in question is the
freedom of the will, and where that second agent can
nihilate, on its own initiative and as a nihilating first cause,
this entitas vialis can be frustrated in regard to the direct
term towards which it tends, at least as to the specification
which it connotes, if not as to the exercise which it con­
notes. Thus the clay of the free will freely fails or fissures
in the hands of the potter.
If the shatterable impetus is shattered by free nihilating,
there is, at this first moment (where we are still in the
physical, not moral, order) a non-consideration of the rule.
The shatterable impetus is thus frustrated in regard to its
direct or proximate term, as I have said, in the order of
specification. But in the order of exercise it nevertheless
reaches a term. The only term it reaches is the application
of the intellect by the will to consider something or other—
but not the rule. The activation towards the consideration
of the rule has been freely nihilated. The will, thus de­
flected by free nihilating, causes the intellect to regard
something other than the rule, some apparent good which
lures the desire. In the second moment there will be, on
God’s side, permission for the effectuation of evil at the
same time as general impetus, particularly to the physical
execution of the evil act. From the side of the created
will, there will be the positing of a deformed free act, de­
prived of consideration of the rule.
If at the first moment (still merely physical) the shatter­
able impetus is not shattered by free nihilating, at that
same moment it reaches, as regards both specification and
exercise, its direct or proximate term (consideration of the
rule, though still without act of option). It reaches this
of itself and without the least contribution made on its sole
initiative by the created agent, which the impetus besieges
from all sides and which owes to that impetus all the action

106

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

dom binds His power, and how far the rule decided
by His love binds its impulse to effusion, is the mys­
tery of mysteries. The fact remains that in the order
of nature the unshatterable activation is preceded
by shatterable activations, as the term in which the
latter fructify of themselves when the nihilating of
the created liberty has not rendered them sterile.
But what it is important to set forth here with un­
mistakable clarity is that the created existent con­
tributes nothing of its own, does nothing, adds noth­
ing, gives nothing—not the shadow of an action or
of a determination coming from it—which would
make of the shatterable impetus an unshatterable
impetus or an impetus that comes to grips with exthat lies within it (not as yet moral). And at the second
moment (with which we enter into the moral order) it will
fructify of itself by reason of its intrinsic ordination, and
will vanish into the unshatterable impetus by virtue of
which the rule will be efficaciously considered in the very
act of option. The final term towards which the shatterable
impetus was tending—the morally good act to be produced
by the free will—will by produced not by the shatterable
impetus itself but by something better than it, something
to which it was ordained as the flower to the fruit.
From the moment we understand that if the shatterable
impetus is not shattered by the free nihilating of the crea­
ture, then it reaches of itself its proximate term, in order to
give way to an unshatterable impetus specifically distinct
from itself, in which it fructifies of itself and by which
the morally good to-act is given; from the moment we
understand that the non-nihilating, which conditions the
fructification of the shatterable impetus in unshatterable
impetus, does absolutely not imply the slightest contribu­
tion made by the creature to the divine motion—from this
moment we have beyond question exorcised every shadow
of Molinism.
These explanations may perhaps help to display how the
metaphysical notions of shatterable and unshatterable im­
petus can serve as foundation for the theological notions of
sufficient and efficacious grace, and furnish from below a
contribution to the rational clarification of those notions.

THE FREE EXISTENT

I07

istence. Not to nihilate under the divine activation,
not to sterilise that impetus, not to have the initiative
of making the thing we call nothing, does not mean
taking the initiative, or the demi-initiative, or the
smallest fraction of the initiative of an act; it does
not mean acting on one’s own to complete, in any
way whatever, the divine activation. It means not
stirring under its touch, but allowing it free passage,
allowing it to bear its fruit ( the unshatterable acti­
vation) by virtue of which the will (which did not
nihilate in the first instance) will act (will look at
the rule efficaciously ) in the very exercise of its dom­
ination over its motives, and will burst forth freely
in a good option and a good act.10 It will then be all
10 To allow the shatterable impetus free passage is to let
it fructify of itself and disappear into the unshatterable im­
petus by virtue of which the good act is produced, namely
the rule efficaciously regarded in the very act of option.
It is proper to remark here that if ‘not to nihilate’ and
‘to consider the rule’ come practically to the same thing,
nevertheless there is, formally, a clear distinction between
the two, and the first formality is the condition of the
second. ‘Not to nihilate’ relates to the first initiative which
the creature can take and does not take. ‘Not to nihilate’
signifies that the creature does nothing through its own
movement. Nothing emanates from it as first cause. It is
not its power as ( nihilating ) first cause which is exercised
in order to not-nihilate! That power purely and simply is
not exercised. From the side of the creature, as first initia­
tive, there is nothing.
Contrariwise, ‘to consider the rule’ relates to the second
initiative which the creatme takes under the motion of the
first divine initiative ( which anticipates it by the shatterable
impetus, and which is exercised in unshatterable impetus
only if the creature has not nihilated). ‘To consider the
rule’ signifies either—at the moment preceding the act of
option—that the creature exercises an action (which is not
yet moral) under the activation of the shatterable impetus
itself attaining its direct term, without there being at the
moment in question (contrary to what happens in the case
of the evil act) any ontological pre-condition to the moral

108

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

the more aided by God, for there is no aid stronger
than that which possesses a decidedly existential
value, which decidedly and efficaciously causes an
act freely posited to come into existence—an act sur­
rounded on all sides with being and with goodness.
One man may have received shatterable motions or
activations of a higher sort than those received by
another. If one renders them sterile by freely nihilact, which would be due to the first created initiative; or­
at the moment when the act of option takes place—that the
creature acts (morally) under the unshatterable impetus for
which way was made by the shatterable motion which was
not shattered. Everything in the regard which is freely
turned upon the rule comes from God as first cause, and
everything comes from the creature as second cause, with­
out there being, on the side of the creature, any other con­
dition than that of having done nothing by its first initiative
as nihilating first cause.
We are far from being able to say that the least contri­
bution made by the created existent renders the shatterable
impetus unshatterable. On the contrary, it is the shatter­
able impetus which of itself makes way for the unshatter­
able impetus and fructifies in it by the sole fact that the
created existent did nothing of itself alone. For the shatter­
able impetus, by its very nature, tended to the unshatterable
impetus and was ordered to it from its very origin. ‘Not to
nihilate’ adds absolutely nothing to the divine motion. The
created existent which nihilates, ‘discerns itself’ for the evil
and the failure, or destines itself to this end; because it
takes the first initiative of nihilating. He who does not
nihilate does not destine himself to the possession of God,
because he takes no first initiative of being or of goodness,
and because he does nothing on his first initiative, con­
tributes nothing by himself alone. It is the divine will
which, in all eternity, destines him to the possession of
God ante praevisa merita, by a primordial but conditional
ordination which extends to all men without exception. If,
precisely, he does nothing on his first initiative (which im­
plies neither the least act nor the least merit) that primor­
dial ordination is confirmed by the definitive ordination in
which he is unconditionally marked for final accomplish­
ment.
‘Deus omnipotens omnes homines sine exceptione vult

THE EREE EXISTENT

IO9

ating, while the other does not render sterile those
which he received, and which fructify of themselves
in unshatterable activation, that other will have been
more greatly loved. He will have been loved to the
degree which counts above all else, the degree of
the communication or effusion of goodness in the ex­
ercise of the existence and effectuation of the act.
Transposing for our purposes, and into our wholly
metaphysical perspective, a classical distinction of
theology,*11 we shall give the name of primordial or
original will to the will of God considered without
regard to particular conditions or circumstances—
what we may also call His naked’ will. This will is
salvos fieri (I Timothy II, 4) licet non omnes salventur.
Quod autem quidam salvantur, salvantis est donum; quod
autem quidem pereunt, pereuntium est meritum.’ Cone.
Carisiacum, Denziger-Bannwart-Umberg, Enchiridion Sym­
bolorum, Freiburg im B., 1947, 318.
‘Deus namque sua gratia semel justificatos non deserit,
nisi ab eis prius deseratur ( S. Aug., De nat. et gratia, c. 26,
N. 29. P.L. 44, 261).’ Cone. Tridentinum, Denziger-Bann­
wart-Umberg, op. cit., 804.
11 Cf. St. John Damascene, De fide Orthodoxa, Lib. II,
Cap. 29, P.G. 94, 967-970; St. Thomas Aquinas, De Veritate,
23, 2 and 3; John of St. Thomas (.Cursus Theologicus [Vives
ed.J Tome III, Quaest. XIX, Disp. 5, Art. 8, pp. 481-500;
[Solesmes ed.J Tome III, In quaest. XIX lae P. Disp. 25,
Art 8, pp. 260-278.) When theologians distinguish in
God between the antecedent will and the consequent
will, they do not mean that two different acts of
will are present in God, but they refer to a simple and
unique will in pure act which has as its term either some­
thing willed as primordially or originally, and in a manner
that will not be infallibly followed by effect, or something
willed as definitively and in a manner which will be in­
fallibly followed by effect. This is translated, in our human
manner of conception, by the virtual distinction between
will called antecedent and will called consequent (or, in
our metaphysical vocabulary, between will called primordial
and will called definitive ).

110

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

not a velleity, it is a true and active will which pro­
jects into the universality of existents the being and
goodness that penetrate them and the flux of incita­
tions, motions, and activations that make them tend
towards their fulfilment and towards the common
good of creation. By this primordial will, the creative
Love wills that all free existents attain to their su­
pra-temporal end.12 It wills this independently of ev­
ery consideration of the good or meritorious acts they
may perform, wills it out of pure generosity. But it
wills it according to the mode of their own fallible
freedom, that is to say, according to shatterable mo­
tions or activations. And if the will that we shall call
‘circumstanced,’ and which is the will of God con­
sidered as taking account of particular conditions
and circumstances (we may also call it His ‘defini­
tive’ will), allows free existents to miss their supra­
temporal end, what can be the circumstance of
which the creative Love then takes account, unless
it be that of the nihilating by which, in the course
of their existence, and especially at the last instant
of their existence, their freedom evades His influx
and renders the divine activation sterile? Suppose
that this initiative of nihilation do not take place on
the part of the free existent; then, as concerns that
free existent, the circumstanced will purely and
simply confirms, in unconditionally and unfailingly
efficacious fashion, the primordial will which, in
willing the final good of all, itself ordained it ( con­
ditionally) to this good. Free existents which attain
their ultimate end attain it only because God willed
it, prior to every consideration of their good and
meritorious acts, by His primordial will confirmed
12 Cf. I Timothy II, 4: ‘Deus omnes homines vult salvos
fieri et ad agnitionem veritatis venire.’

THE FREE EXISTENT

111

( as I have just said ) by His definitive will. The free
existents who miss their ultimate end do so only be­
cause they have willed to miss it and have freely
evaded that which was ordained by the primordial
will. God permits this on account of the initiative of
nihilating by which their freedom, especially at the
last instant of their lives, rendered the divine activa­
tion sterile and thereupon flung them into evil.
These, St. Thomas used to say, are the fore-known
(praesciti); the others are the predestined. And all
this is established from all eternity because every
moment of time is present to the divine eternity and
to the eternal will and eternal vision of God.
I am aware that by employing two of St. Thomas’s
words I have moved into a realm that I had pro­
scribed for myself. I am aware that the ultimate end
of free existents being in fact a supernatural end,
the vision of God Himself, I should write ‘salvation’
where I have written attainment of the supra-tem­
poral end, ‘predestination’ where I have written ordainment to the final good confirmed by the defini­
tive will, ‘antecedent will and consequent will’
where I have written primordial will and definitive
will, ‘sufficient grace and efficacious grace’ where I
have written shatterable impetus and unshatterable
impetus. I am aware that vast theological problems
in which faith is involved arise and complicate the
simple views of reason which I have advanced un­
der a merely metaphysical aspect.13
13 We are not presently concerned with these problems.
We should like, however, to make two observations. First,
the domain of grace is that of the sovereign liberty and the
sovereign transcendence of the Deus excelsus, terribilis,
Who does injustice to none by giving to one more than He
gives (also gratuitously) to another, and Who, in govern­
ing created liberties in their progress here below, can use,

112

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

But I believe that the purely philosophical consid­
eration of the principles of the natural order in­
volved in the problem of the destiny of free existents,
which I have attempted to grapple with, can lead
to a sort of rational plan which would not be de­
stroyed but rather exalted by passing to the higher
and deeper and more complex views of theology.

The Divine Science

31. Sixth consideration: Divine knowledge of the
free acts of the created existent. We must never lose
sight of the fact that the divine understanding or di­
vine science, the pure Act of knowledge which is
God Himself and His pure Act of existing, is totally
and absolutely independent of things. The divine un­
derstanding is its own object. Created beings are not
when He pleases, exceptional ways which exceed the ordi­
nary governance required by nature—for example, by giv­
ing at one stroke to some among them (I think of Paul on
the road to Damascus) an unshatterable impetus to con­
version. Secondly, as concerns the primordial mystery of
predestination, and the application which a theologian
could make of the metaphysical presuppositions here indi­
cated, we should like to observe that these metaphysical
presuppositions are in strict accord with what sacred tradi­
tion teaches concerning this mystery. The created existents
which, according to the conception put forth by us, are
ordained in all eternity to eternal life, ante praevisa merita,
by the primordial or ‘antecedent’ will confirmed by the
definitive or ‘consequent’ will (from the moment they did
not take the initiative of nihilating at the critical juncture)
were by the definitive or ‘consequent’ will inscribed in the
book of life before the world was created. We must say of
them what St. Paul says: ‘quos praedestinavit, hos et voca­
vit, et quos vocavit, hos et justificavit: quos autem justifi­
cavit, illos et glorificavit.’ (Romans VIII, 30).

THE FREE EXISTENT

113

its object.14 They do not in any way specify or deter­
mine it; with regard to it they are merely a terminus
materialiter attactus,15 a field that is gratuitously
permeated by way of excess and surplus goodness.
They change, are born, and perish; but the knowl­
edge or understanding which God has of them does
not change. This divine science knows all things. But
even if God had not created anything, if there were
no things, God’s knowledge or science itself would
remain perfectly unchanged; because it is God Who
is its object. He fills and saturates it. Imagine a poet
completely enraptured in the absolute knowledge of
his soul. Whether or not his knowledge superabound
in song, the words he utters in his poetry or does not
utter at all do not alter that knowledge itself. The
beings he creates in his poetry are attained and
permeated, transpermeated, by his knowledge as by
a gratuitous super-effluence. Indeed, they are made
by that knowledge. They neither touch nor change
that subsistent flash of self-knowledge. God knows
and loves all existents. They do not impinge upon
His knowledge and His love after the manner of
specifying objects. In the act by which He knows
Himself and loves His own goodness, God embraces
all existents as effects flowing from the infinite gra­
tuitousness in which that act superabounds.16*
18
14 In the proper meaning of the term object, namely, the
specifying term of knowledge. Cf. St. Thomas, In Metaph.,
XII, ir, Cathala ed., pp. 2614-2616 in connection with the
famous text of Aristotle, Met., XII, 9, 1074b, 29-35.
15 “Nude terminativum et materiale objectum.” John of
St. Thomas, Curs, theol., (Vivés ed.) Tome II, Quaest.
XIV, Disp. 17, A. 2, p. 464; (Solesmes ed. ) Tome II, In
Quaest. XIV lae P. Disp. 17, Art. 2, p. 361.
18 Cf. John of St. Thomas, Cursus Theologicus (Vives
ed. ), Tome III, Quaest. XIX, Disp. 4, Art. 3, p. 238;

114

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

God knows all things in Himself or in His essence,
in the uncreated light, which is His own infinite in­
telligibility and which is infinitely more limpid and
richer than the intelligibility of things.
In His essence He knows possibles by a necessary
knowledge, a knowledge as necessary as that which
He has of Himself. According to our human way of
conceiving, and the virtual distinctions to which we
are forced to have recourse, it must be said that
neither His will nor His liberty intervenes in that
knowledge. For this reason it is called the ‘science of
simple intelligence.’
Existents also are known to Him in His essence.
They are known, as I have already remarked, as gra­
tuitous surplus, and by a creative knowledge in
which will and liberty are linked with intellect, a
knowledge which freely makes known, as it freely
makes existent that which it creates. Here all con­
tingency is on the side of the term of this creative
knowledge. This is what is called the ‘science of vi­
sion,’ because it passes beyond simple intellection of
essences and bears upon existence and the existent.
I have said that God knows all things in His es­
sence. I have not said, God forbid! that in His es­
sence, He knows images resembling things but not
things themselves. Such a conception would simply
make of the divine essence a mosaic of portraits of
the finite. In the intelligibility in pure act of the in­
finite essence, which is at one His own act of existing
and the object of His knowledge, God knows the
multitude of finite beings as so many participations
in that essence. He passes through the infinite to
reach the finite. But He reaches the finite itself and
(Solesmes ed. ) Tome III, In Quaest. XIX lae P. Disp. 24,
Art. 3, p. 77.

THE FREE EXISTENT

lig

does so in a necessarily exhaustive understanding
since it is that very act of knowing which makes
things be.
In knowing His essence God knows all possibles
in all the recesses of their intelligibility. In knowing
His essence and His will (by which He necessarily
wills His own goodness and freely wills things ) He
knows all existents in all the recesses of their being.
The ‘science of vision reaches the existent in the
very exercise of existence. It holds and trans-permeates all created existents because it creates all
that is in them and because it is by knowing them
that it creates them. In the very act by which God’s
‘science of vision gratuitously sets up created exist­
ents as terms of the act by which He knows Himself,
or as things known to Him ( by the excess of His own
self-knowledge), in that very act the ‘science of vi­
sion freely makes them terms of the creative action
and constitutes them beings in their own existence.
It possesses the world of existence and of the exist­
ent, of subjects and of subjectivities, from within; it
sees contingent existence because it causes it, and
because, by making it known, it makes it be.
The ‘science of vision’ likewise reaches the free­
dom of the created existent in the very exercise of
its free choice. We know that the free act is abso­
lutely unforeseeable. But the ‘science of vision’ does
not ‘foresee’ the free act but grasps it eternally in its
very presentness, in the very instant in which it is
produced.
All that is, is known to God because He causes it.
Such is the case of the free act of the created exist­
ent. When that act is good, it is known to God be­
cause all that is in it derives from the divine super­
causality as from its first transcendent cause.

116

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

But how does God’s science know the evil of the
free will, the evil which makes the free act evil? On
this point, St. Thomas has two principles which de­
serve to be meditated upon. First, God is absolutely
not a cause of moral evil,17 not in any respect whatso­
ever. Here, therefore, is something that God knows
without having caused it ( something which is not a
thing but a privation ). Secondly, there is no idea of
evil in the divine intellect, because the divine idea
signifies a way in which the divine essence can be
participated and is therefore of itself the source of
intelligibility or the cause of being.18 The purity of
God, the innocence of God, is such that He has the
idea only of good, He has not the idea of evil. It is
we who have that idea. God knows evil for what it
is: a privation, a nihilating which wounds being;
and He knows it at the point where it occurs—in the
being that it wounds or in the good that it defaces.
17 This principle is not peculiar to St. Thomas; it is essen­
tial to the Catholic faith. St. Thomas points out that it is
found in St. Augustine: ‘Sed contra est quod dicit Augustinius in libro Octog. trium Quaest. quod Deus non est
auctor mali, quia non est causa tendendi ad non esse.’ The
passage referred to reads as follows: Quisquis omnium quae
sunt auctor est et ad cujus bonitatem id tantum pertinet ut
sit omne quod est non esse ad eum pertinere nullo pacto
potest. Omne autem quod deficit, ab eo quod est esse deficit
et tendit in non esse. Esse autem et in nullo deficere
bonum est, et malum est deficere. At ille ad quem non esse
non pertinet non est causa deficiendi, i.e., tendendi ad non
esse; quia, ut ita dicam, essendi causa est. (St. Augustine,
De Diversis Quaestionibus Octoginta tres. Qu. 21, P.L. 40.
16). ‘Deus est auctor mali quod est poena, non autem mali
quod est culpa,’ Sum. theol., I, 49, 2, c. ‘Deus non potest
esse causa peccati,’ Ibid., 63, 5, c. ‘Deus nullo modo est
causa peccati nec directe nec indirecte.’ I-II, 79, 1, c.
18 ‘Malum non habet in Deo ideam, neque secundum
quod idea est exemplar, neque secundum quod est ratio.’
Sum. theol., I, 15, 2, ad 1.

THE FREE EXISTENT

11/

The evil of the free act has as its first cause ( nihilating, not efficient, cause ) not God but the free will
of the created existent. How, then, could it be known
by a divine volition ( even permissive ) which would
precede its engendering by the creature as the di­
vine volition of the good act precedes that act? There
are two divine permissions without which evil would
never reach existence. One is the permission of the
possibility of evil, enveloped in advance in the frustrability of what we have called the shatterable di­
vine impetus which created liberty, if it so wills, is
able to render sterile. The other is the permission
for the effectuation of evil,19 once created liberty has
already nihilated in fact, but without having as yet
acted (in that moment of non-consideration of the
rule which precedes the evil option). But that mo­
ment itself, when the creature takes the initiative of
making the thing called nothing and thereby asks,
so to say, permission to do evil—that moment pre­
cedes the permission given it, consequently it is not
known in that permission, i.e., in the non-will to ap­
ply a remedy to that nihilating. It can be known only
in the actually deficient or nihilating free will.
How? Is it not in His essence that God knows
things? I answer that He knows in Himself alone all
that which is causable or caused by Him, though it
be only by accident (like the evil of nature20). But
what is not causable nor caused by Him, that of
which He is absolutely not the cause, like the evil
19 Here, in the permission for the effectuation of evil, is
situated the notion of permissive decree (including permis­
sion that the general motion which activates the whole
physical order be not withheld from the physical content
of the evil act).
20 Cf. Sum. theol., I, 49, 2.

118

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

of the free act and like the free nihilating which is
its precondition, these God does not know in the di­
vine essence considered alone, but in the divine es­
sence in as much as created existents are seen
therein, and in as much as in them is seen that ni­
hilating and privation of which their freedom is the
first cause. In other terms, He knows that nihilating
and that privation in the created existents whom He
knows in His essence. It is in this sense that I said
that the non-consideration of the rule’ which pre­
cedes the evil option (that nihilating whose impor­
tance is crucial for the present discussion because
it is a pure non-being due solely to the freedom of
the existent) is known to God in the actually defi­
cient or nihilating will.21
The knowledge of God is not determined or speci­
fied by anything other than God. It knows (‘science
of simple intelligence’ ) possible creatures in God
alone; I mean in the divine essence taken as such.
Their possibility cannot be abolished any more than
the divine essence itself of which they are participa­
tions eternally and necessarily seen by the under­
standing which God possesses of Himself. And it
knows (‘science of vision’) created existents and all
the being and liberty they possess, in God alone; I
mean in the divine essence taken not only as the
ground of all possibles but as enveloping the divine
will which freely determines certain among them to
exist in an existence which is not that of God. And
finally the divine science knows the fissure of nonbeing or the nihilating (the vacuum, the pure ab­
sence, the moment of non-consideration of the rule,
21 Cf. J. Maritain, Frontières de la poésie (‘La Clef des
Chants’), pp. 189-192. Eng. trans., Art and Poetry, N. Y.,
i943> PP- 84-86.

THE FREE EXISTENT

II9

which has its origin only in the liberty of created ex­
istence ) in the actually nihilating will of created ex­
istents known in God—that is, in the divine essence
conjointly with the gratuitous surplus embraced by
it—or, to put it in another way, in the created ex­
istents whom the science of God knows in the divine
essence and knows exhaustively because creatively;
whom it holds entirely in its hand, down to the last
cranny and the least quiverings of their subjectivity
and their activity.
It knows this pure absence without having caused
it, and yet without having received anything from
the creature. How, indeed, could a bit of non-being
determine or specify anything at all? A fortiori it
could not determine or specify pure Act, whose
touch affects all things but which is affected by none.
The divine science knows this absence as a terminus
materialiter attactus. And this ‘terminus’ is not a be­
ing. It is the vacuum or negation, the lacuna actually
produced in the being which the ‘science of vision
wholly embraces, and which itself is formed like clay
in the hands of the potter by God’s knowledge, but
does not form or cause that knowledge. And because
God knows, in the created existent whom He knows
in His essence, this fissure of nothingness of which
the freedom of the created existent is the first cause,
God (if He does not will to remedy it) does not pre­
vent—that is, He permits the evil to work itself out
in the free act of which that fissure is the precondi­
tion.
That evil itself, which is not a mere lacuna or pure
absence, but is a privation, is effected in the frpe act.
It makes of that act something, in the moral line,
purely and simply evil; but, in so far as the act con­
tains being and energy, it retains metaphysical good­

120

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

ness and depends to that extent upon divine causal­
ity. However, in so far as it is moral evil, God is in
no wise its cause. We must therefore say of it what
we said of the moment of nihilating which precedes
it: God knows it in the created existent whom He
knows in the divine essence. That privation, a moral
evil which wounds the act of the creature, is known
to God without being caused by Him, by the fact
that in the divine essence created existents are seen,
moral evil is known in them, in the panorama of
those existents which are embraced by the ‘science
of vision’—a spectacle which might never have been.
He did not invent evil; it is we who invent it. We are
its first cause (nihilating, not efficient). It is our
creation.

The Eternal Plan
32. Seventh and final consideration: God’s eternal
plan and the free existents. We may now conclude.
God’s plan is eternal, as is the creative act itself,
though it have its effect in time. God’s plan is estab­
lished from all eternity. But eternity is not a kind of
divine time which precedes time. It is a limitless in­
stant which indivisibly embraces the whole succes­
sion of time. All the moments of that succession are
physically present in it. If all things are naked and
open to the eyes of God it is because they are seen
by His divine ‘science of vision’ in their presentness.
‘To foresee’ is an improper word to use when speak­
ing of God. We employ it because we project into
His eternity the anteriority (in relation to future
events ) of the knowledge which we wotdd have of
those events if we knew them before they happened.

THE FREE EXISTENT

121

They are known to Him ‘already,’ which is to say,
always. He sees them as actually taking place at a
given temporal instant which is present in His eter­
nity. All things and all events in nature are known
to Him at their first coming forth and in the eternal
morning of His vision, because they are willed by
Him, beyond all time, in the eternal instant with
which their whole succession coexists.
But when we deal with the world of freedom, and
not only with that of nature, when we deal with free
existents, creatures endowed with freedom of choice
(a freedom inevitably fallible), we must go still far­
ther. We must say that in a certain fashion those
creatures have their part in the very establishment
of the eternal plan, not, indeed, by virtue of their
power to act (here all they have they hold of God)
but by virtue of their power to nihilate, to make the
thing that is nothing, where they themselves are first
causes. Free existents have their part in the estab­
lishment of God’s plan, because in establishing that
plan, He takes account of their initiatives of nihil­
ating.
The divine plan was always willed. Assuming that
God willed it at all, it cannot but be that He willed
it always.22 Yet conversely, assuming that He had not
willed it, it would necessarily have to be that He
had never willed it. He freely willed it always, for all
its contingency is on the side of that which is di­
rected and ordained, not on the side of the act that
directs and ordains it. And I say that, since the spec­
tacle of created existents ordained and directed (i.e.,
the term, or matter, of the divine plan) is essentially
and radically contingent; and since this contingency
22 Cf. Sum. theol., I, 19, 3; Summa contra Gentiles, lib. I,
cap. 81-83.

122

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

in no way affects the divine plan itself or the divine
act that established it, there is nothing to prevent
the free nihilating of the creature from intervening
in this contingency of the spectacle immutably or­
dained and directed by God. For that nihilating is
itself eternally and immutably seen by God, without
for that reason introducing a shadow of contingency
into His knowledge. And since the spectacle of
created beings is ordained and directed from all
eternity—not in advance ( as if eternity were itself in
time and the eternal act a thing of the past), but in
the eternal to-day in which all the successive mo­
ments of existence are indivisibly present—since this
is so, the effect which ensues from that nihilating is
eternally and immutably permitted or non-permitted
by God without for this reason introducing a shadow
of contingency or of conditioning into His will.23
The divine plan is not a scenario prepared in ad­
vance, in which free subjects would play parts and
act as performers. We must purge our thought of any
idea of a play written in advance, at a time prior to
time—a play in which time unfolds, and the charac­
ters of time read the parts. On the contrary, every­
23 The will of God is not, like ours, a ‘power’ or ‘faculty’
which produces acts: it is pure act. There is in it no act of
will susceptible of being conditioned by another act of will,
or by any created circumstance. For example, God does
not make an act of will to punish a sinning creature, which
act would be conditioned by the creature’s sin. The eternal
act of will by which God wills necessarily His own good­
ness (which is His being itself) freely renders (by a gratui­
tous surplus) such and such acts or events willed or per­
mitted. They are, moreover, rendered willed or permitted
as ordained to a given end, or depending upon certain cir­
cumstances and certain conditions. In this, however, all the
contingency and all the conditioning is on the side of the
term.

THE FREE EXISTENT

I23

thing is improvised, under the eternal and immuta­
ble direction of the almighty Stage Manager. The
divine plan is the ordination of the infinite multiplic­
ity of things, and of their becoming, by the abso­
lutely simple gaze of the creative knowledge and
the will of God. It is eternal and immutable, but it
could have been otherwise ( since it could not have
been had there not been things). Once fixed from
all eternity, once assumed as fixed in such and such
a way from all eternity, it is immutable. And it is by
virtue of the eternal presence of time in eternity
(even before time was), by virtue of the embrace,
by the eternal instant, of history in the making
( perpetually fresh in its newness and indeed—as re­
gards free acts—in its unforeseeability ) that the di­
vine plan is immutably fixed in heaven from all
eternity, directing history towards the ends willed
by God and disposing towards those ends all the ac­
tors in the drama and all the good God causes in
them, while taking advantage, on behalf of those
ends, of the evil itself of which they are the nihilating
first cause and which God permits without having
caused it.
By reason of this free nihilating, the creature has
a portion of first initiative in the drama. Unless the
free existent has received at one stroke an unshatter­
able impetus to good, it depends solely upon him
whether he will or will not take the initiative of ni­
hilating or of non-consideration of the rule, under
the motions and activations which bear him towards
good. Will he or will he not nihilate under the hand
of the potter? As concerns his good or evil act, and
the repercussions it may have upon what follows in
the drama, it is at that instant in time, known from
all eternity, that the immutable plan is simultané-

124

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

ously established from all eternity. Let us suppose
that the free creature has not, in that instant, the
initiative of the thing that is nothing. The initiative
of nihilating not being seen (from all eternity) in the
free existent by the ‘science of vision,’ from all
eternity, the primordial will of God (which willed
the good act of this creature in the direction of the
particular end towards which it ordained him) is
confirmed by the definitive or circumstanced will.
Thus from all eternity the accomplishment of this
good act by this creature is immutably fixed in the
eternal plan. Let us suppose, on the contrary, that
at that instant the free creature has the initiative of
the thing that is nothing. Then, this is seen from all
eternity in the free existent by the ‘science of vision’;
and from all eternity God’s definitive or circum­
stanced will ( if it does not will to prevent the natural
effect of this nihilating) permits the evil act of which
this creature has the first initiative; and from all
eternity the permission of this evil act, ordained to
a better good (itself willed either determinately or
indeterminately),24 is immutably fixed in the eternal
plan. Thus we can conceive, by the aid of the mo24 There is nothing that is willed indeterminately, if we
consider the eternal will and the entire procession of events
in time with all the free acts contained therein. But in rela­
tion to a given moment in history and in time, where a
given event is willed or permitted, I understand by ‘good
willed indeterminately’ a good willed as to be attained, by
modes, ways, and determinations which, considering that
moment in time and taking account of the free nihilations
which can still intervene and bring about other divine per­
missions, are not yet fixed. All is eternally fixed in the
eternal plan, where there is no succession and which em­
braces every time. But we cannot imagine any idea of this
eternal plan and the ordinations it includes except by intro­
ducing the distinctions of reason and the moments of reason
required by our human mode of conceiving.

THE FREE EXISTENT

125

ments o£ reason which our human mode of conceiv­
ing is forced to distinguish in the divine will, that
the variegated drama of history and humanity, with
its infinite interweavings, is immutably fixed from all
eternity by the perfectly and infinitely simple domi­
nating act of divine knowledge and free will, ac­
count being taken of all free existents and of all the
free nihilations of which these existents have or have
not the initiative, throughout the whole succession
of time whose every moment is present in eternity.
Let no one say that man alters the eternal plan!
That would be an absurdity. Man does not alter it.
He enters into its very composition and its eternal
fixity by his power of saying, No!
To tell the truth, I do not see how things could be
conceived otherwise. Suppose that the eternal plan
were a scenario prepared in advance. Suppose that
in that scenario it was written that Brutus was to as­
sassinate Caesar.25 Then, when Brutus steps forth
upon the stage of the world, either the Stage Man­
ager will leave him truly free to have or not have
the first initiative of sin, in which case Brutus might
not murder Caesar and might thus frustrate the
eternal plan—which is absurd; or else the Stage
Manager will arrange in one way or another, with
antecedent permissive decrees or supercomprehen­
sions of causes, that Brutus really assassinate Caesar
but still commit the murder freely. How then and
by what subtleties, can one avoid the conclusion that
God had the first initiative of the sin, and, were it
25 St. Thomas, in the commentary on the Sentences (II,
dist. 44, 9, 2, a. 2, ad. 5), excuses this sin in Brutus. Dante,
meanwhile ('Paradiso c. 6, v. 74), puts him with Judas in
the lowest circle of hell. Here, for the sole purpose of the
argument, we adopt Dante’s view and assume that Brutus
was a criminal.

126

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

merely by slackening His hand, caused the creature
to fall into it?
It was Brutus who had the first initiative of the
free nihilating by which, God permitting, the de­
cision of murder entered into his will and into the
history of the world. If, at that instant in time, eter­
nally present in the eternal instant, he had not had
that initiative of nihilating, the immutable plan
would have fixed things in another way from all
eternity. Caesar’s fall would have been led up to by
other ways, as would also the accomplishment of
God’s designs with regard to Rome and to the world
to which that fall was related and for which it was
willed.
I have said that in God there is no idea of evil. He
invented Behemoth and Leviathan, and all the terri­
fying forms which people nature and the world of
life—the ferocious fishes, the destroying insects. He
did not invent moral evil and sin. It was not He who
had the idea of all the defilements and abominations
and contempts that are spat into His Face; the be­
trayals, lecheries, cruelties, cowardices, bestial wick­
ednesses, refined perversions, depravities of mind
which it is given to His creatures to contemplate.
Those were born solely of nihilation by human lib­
erty. They came forth from that abyss. God permits
them as a creation of our power to make the thing
which is nothing.
He permits them because He is strong enough, as
St. Augustine says, to turn all the evil we choose to
introduce into the world, into a greater good—hid­
den in the mystery of transcendence and such that
nothing in nature allows us to conjecture what it may
consist in. The man of faith, who is to have a sus­
picion of the greatness of that good, and marvel at

THE FREE EXISTENT

I27

it, measures the greatness of the evil for which such
a good will supercompensate.
Our misfortune is precisely that there is no sce­
nario written by God in advance (it would be less
sinister); and that the ill-omened element of the
drama comes from created existents, ourselves; and
from the fact that God plays fair. Since the evil of
the free act is our creation, it is in letting our mon­
sters proliferate to the very end, and allowing the
infinite resources of our power of nihilating to de­
velop all forms of degradation and corruption of
being, that divine liberty manifests the sublimity of
its omnipotence by drawing from that itself the
higher good which God designs, not for Himself but
for us.26 Meanwhile, despite all the energies of good­
ness at work in man, nature, and history, which
cause them to advance by rising above their ruins,
‘the whole world is seated in wickedness’27 and the
terrible, the incorruptible, divine fair play leaves us
to Sounder in the mire. Such at least is the way in
which it is allowable for a philosopher to look upon
the order of nature. Fortunately, there is also the or­
der of grace, and the virtue of the blood of Christ,
the sufferings and prayers of the saints, and the hid­
den operations of mercy. All these, without infring­
ing the laws of divine fair play, introduce into the
most secret recesses of the plot factors which trans­
figure it. They manifest the heavenly ordering ac­
cording to which souls are deputed to eternal life,
bodies to resurrection, and the wickedness of the
free creatures becomes the price paid for glory. On
this very earth, they make love prevail over sin (if,
26 Deus gloriam suam quaerit non propter se, sed propter
nos. St. Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol., II-II, 132, 1, ad 1.
27 Mundus totus in maligno positus est. I John V, 19.

128

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

at least, we have eyes to see ) ; and they come invis­
ibly to help each one to reach the hereafter even
while the sad, ordinary laws and the miseries of the
herebefore are at work upon all. For those who serve
God they cause all things to cooperate in goodness,
and to cover with His wings those who have given
all to Him. They strengthen the springs and the re­
sources of nature by offering, in spite of everything,
their mercy; by bringing, in spite of everything,
their succour; by giving, in spite of everything, some
respite to peoples and to nations; and, in spite of
everything, by guiding history towards its accom­
plishment. A more than human grandeur is dissem­
bled in our creeping destinies. A sense is given to
our wretched condition; and this is probably what
matters most to us. It remains a wretched condition
—but the existent who vegetates in it is cut out to
become God by participation.

Chapter Five
ECCE IN PACE

From Existential Existentialism to
Academic Existentialism

33. In the last essay he left to his friends before
being led away and put to death behind the bars of
racism, Benjamin Fondane wrote that for Kierke­
gaard and the ‘first existential generation’ the noth­
ingness which anguish reveals to man ‘is not a noth­
ingness of the existent but is a nothingness in the
existent. It is the crack in the existent: sin, the
“swoon of liberty.” n
If, as I too believe, such is the genuine and deep­
est meaning of Kierkegaardian anguish, it must be
said that by way of a spiritually crucifying existence,
Kierkegaard revealed to modern philosophy a truth
which undoubtedly was always known to the saints
and was always more or less scrutinised by theolo­
gians, but which went far beyond philosophy; a
truth which modern philosophy was unable to un­
derstand and which has disorganised it.
The nothingness of which I myself am the cause,
which ravages my being and causes my God to die;
the loud cry that rises from the depths, the terror of
1 Benj’amin Fondane, ‘Le Lundi existentiel et le Dimanche
de l’histoire,’ in L’Existence, Paris, 1945, p. 35.

130

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

Good Friday, the drama of the infelix homo—('but
I am carnal, sold under sin; for that which I work, I
understand not: for I do not that good which I will:
but the evil which I hate, that I do. . . . Unhappy
man that I am; who shall deliver me from the body
of this death?’2 )—Abraham’s sacrifice; Job’s sores
and his lament, more glorious to God than all the
theodicies; the unanswerable questionings raised by
the existent in the direction of the mystery of the
Castle and the divine ways,—all this irrupted sud­
denly into modern philosophy, shook its fine con­
fidence, ruffled its serenity. But not for long. Mod­
ern philosophy quickly took hold of itself.
Normally and necessarily, according to the laws
inscribed in our being, there are among men and
even in the same man (in whom they can and
ought to coexist on different lines ) two attitudes or
rather tensions, two fundamentally different postures
of the mind. The first I shall call the posture of
cause-seeking. This attitude is characterised by a
certain theoretical universality or detachment from
self for the purpose of knowing: the sapiential mien
or bearing. This is the attitude of the intellect con­
cerned to know and apprehend being: the bearing
of Minerva, let us say, confronting the cosmos. The
other I shall call the posture of saving my all, the
attitude of dramatic singularity or supreme struggle
for the salvation of self, the imprecatory mien or
bearing, that of the man who wills his God, or rather
is willed by Him: the bearing of Jacob, say, wrestling
with the Angel.
The first attitude, tension, or posture is essentially
philosophical. It is this that makes the philosopher.
2 Romans VII, 14-15, 24.

ECCE IN PACE

131

The second is essentially religious. It makes the man
of faith ( or one who despairs of God ). It is non-sense
to think of making the bearing or posture of Jacob
in the night of his combat with the angel the attitude
of metaphysics, with its special way of coming to
grips with the law of things. It is non-sense to think
of making the bearing or posture of Minerva in her
search for causes the attitude of faith, with its spe­
cial manner of tackling the dialogue with the God
of faith. We do not philosophise in the posture of
dramatic singularity; we do not save our souls in the
posture of theoretical universality and detachment
from self for the purpose of knowing.
Clearly, the second of these two attitudes, pos­
tures, or tensions which I have just distinguished,
the posture of saving my all, was that of existential
existentialism lived and exercised ( in actu exercito ).
In this very fact lay the grandeur of its testimony,
the power of its shattering strength, and the value
of its intuitions. The existentialism of Kierkegaard,
of Kafka,3 of Chestov, of Fondane, was an es­
sentially religious irruption and claim, an agony of
faith, the cry of the subjectivity towards its God. It
was at the same time a revelation of the person and
of his anguish in the face of the nothingness which
is non-being in the existent, the ‘crack in the exist­
ent.’
But because of the historic circumstances in
which it was born, and particularly because of Hegel
and the implacable fascination of his totalitarianism
of the reason, it was the misfortune of this existen­
tialism to arise and develop within philosophy. As it
arose and developed it was inseparable from the
3 Cf. Max Brod, ‘Kierkegaard, Heidegger et Kafka,’ in
L’Arche, November, 1946.

132

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

philosophy with which it was in merciless conflict,
held and gripped by the very philosophy it was
seeking to strike to the heart—the principle of non­
contradiction. Existential existentialism was thus like
a man struggling in the coils of a gigantic reptile. By
an astounding mistake, and as the effect of an in­
evitable illusion, this protest of a faith, caught in a
Babylonian captivity, came forth into the world
dressed in the livery of Babylon. It was a religious
protest in the guise of a philosophy—a philosophy
directed against the professionals of philosophy; and
this was, of course, most comforting. But also ( and
here an entire tragedy was involved), it was a phi­
losophy against philosophy.
Professionals always get their revenge. The game
was lost before it began. Existential existentialism
was doomed to be the prey of the boa constrictor.
Modern philosophy was to adopt it, make it its own,
digest it, assimilate it, and, thanks to it, apply restor­
atives to the old frame of its worn-out concepts.
Philosophical or academic existentialism was bound
to come: existentialism as designed (in actu sig­
nato), as a machine for making ideas, as an appa­
ratus for the fabrication of theses. And indeed the
blame should be put on existential existentialism
which, except in the case of Kafka, had mistaken it­
self for a philosophy. The philosophical ( I dare not
say, sapiential) posture was naturally and inevitably
to replace the imprecatory posture, and with it the
agony and the anguish, of the man of faith. Or
rather, when current thought went back once more
to the philosophical attitude (which is noble and
necessary if man venerates the reason by which he
lives, but vain and degraded if he flouts it), that
agony and that anguish were to be treasured, but

ECCE IN PACE

ISS

because they now became that which philosophers
talk and dilate upon, not that which makes one talk
or rave. They were to be retained as new principles
upon which systems would be built, and as new
themes to be artfully exploited. The cry sent up
from the depth of the abyss has become a philosoph­
ical theme. Minerva (but what a Minerva! ) has car­
ried off Jacob’s ladder to her workshop. She is sawing
it up into segments of theatre settings and of seats
for literary bigwigs.
This fine task was not accomplished without some
wear and tear upon Minerva herself. She has grown
to be something of a sloven. It turns out that this
seeking the kingdom of God by way of violence and
revolt of the soul has had no other result than to de­
bauch reason. The great existential existentialism,
once it had been absorbed into the body of its en­
emy, succeeded only in bringing about, in philoso­
phy itself, a philosophical destruction of the intellect,
which is likely to yield profits for some years: a
philosophical art of ideological proliferations of the
absurd, cleverly barricaded behind Freudian analy­
ses and phenomenological parentheses, and a com­
plete philosophical liquidation of the basic realities
and radical claims of the person and subjectivity.
Everything that was essentially linked with the
supreme combat for the salvation of the self, or the
imprecatory tension and posture of faith, has inevi­
tably disappeared. The soul has been evacuated.
The cry sent up to God, the frenzy or the despair
bom of excess of hope, the expectancy of miracle,
the sense of sacrifice and the sense of sin, the spirit­
ual agony, the eternal dignity of the existent, the
grandeur of its liberty raised up on the ruins of its
nature, all have necessarily been evacuated. Job has

134

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

been evacuated: only the dunghill has been kept.
The nothingness in the existent has been replaced
by the nothingness of the existent. The horror of free
nihilation which plunders existence has been re­
placed by the taking note of that natural non-being
which limitation is in regard to existence, and with
which the antinomies of the sovereign dialectic af­
flict the latter. Or it has been replaced by the expe­
rience of the threat with which the casual anybody
holds over the I; or by the acceptance (in which
pride at least receives its due) of the impotence of
the for-it-self to do anything except corrode and
nullify existence; and of the nausea which comes
over the mind at the sight of the stupid gratuitous­
ness of the in-itself and the radical absurdity of ex­
istence.4 The moral tragedy has been replaced by
a sophisticated metaphysics.
Every philosophy has its merits. I do not deny the
merits of the philosophies of which I speak, nor the
elements of truth they have been able to lay hold of.
However disappointingly they may do so, their mere
invocation of the words existence and liberty shows
that they have at least been able to discern what
was chiefly lacking in our contemporaries, and that
4 ‘Thus, nothingness is that hole in being, that drop of
the in-itself towards the self by which the for-itself is con­
stituted.’ J. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, p. 12 r. ‘The foritself therefore corresponds to a disrestraining déstructura­
tion of the in-itself, and the in-itself nullifies itself and is
absorbed into its attempt to found itself. It is therefore not
a substance of which the for-itself could be the attribute
and which could produce thought without being absorbed
into that production itself. It remains simply in the foritself as a memory of being, as its unjustifiable presence in
the world. Being-in-itself can found its nothingness, but not
its being. In its decomposition it nullifies itself in a foritself which becomes, as for-itself, its own basis. But its
contingence as in-itself remains unassailable.’ Ibid., p. 127.

ECCE IN PACE

135

they are at least trying to make up, in their own way,
for that which the systems of our great architects
had most decidedly forgotten. My aim has been
merely to indicate by what curve of a tolerably re­
liable logic, modem thought has moved from exis­
tential existentialism to academic existentialism,
from the existentialism of faith to the atheistic exis­
tentialism.
I am aware that there are other forms of philo­
sophical existentialism, and that there is, in particu­
lar, a Christian existentialism which challenges athe­
istic existentialism with a perspicacity all the keener
and a pugnacity all the more lively for the fact that
theirs is a family quarrel. In the order of a genuine
phenomenology (where moral and psychological
analysis is really an approach to ontological prob­
lems and where the very purity of an unprejudiced
investigation allows philosophy to plumb human ex­
perience and to isolate its real meanings and values )
this Christian existentialism is past master, and it
contributes very valuable discoveries. Nevertheless,
I do not believe that it can ever develop into a met­
aphysic properly so called, any more than any other
philosophy which refuses to admit the intellectual
intuition of being. It cannot father a metaphysics
that is comprehensive, articulated, founded upon
reason, and capable of exercising the functions of
wisdom as well as of knowledge. For the same rea­
son I do not believe that in the evolution of philo­
sophical thought, it will ever succeed in becoming
more than a side issue, nor will it successfully resist
the historic impetus which at the present time gives
to atheistic existentialism ( and will in the future give
to new systems issuing in like fashion out of the
central positions of the long tradition that goes back

136

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

to Descartes) an ephemeral but vast power over
men’s minds. To arrest that trend the springs would
have to be purified all the way back to their original
source. It would be necessary to overcome acquired
habits and critical negligence accumulated in the
course of three centuries, and to break with the er­
rors common to existentialist irrationalism, idealism,
empirical nominalism, and classical rationalism.

The Situation of Existentialism

34. “We believe that the central intuition on which
the existentialism of a Kierkegaard lived was in the
last analysis the same as that which lies at the heart
of Thomism. We refer to the intuition of the abso­
lutely singular value and the primacy of the act of
existing, the existentia ut exercita. But in Kierke­
gaard it sprang from the depths of a faith filled with
anguish, robbed of its intelligible or superintelligible
structure, desperately expecting the miraculous and
rejecting the mystical possession for which it thirsts;
it sprang from a radically irrationalist thought which
rejects and sacrifices essences and falls back upon
the night of subjectivity.’5 These fines which I wrote
elsewhere seem to me still to be true. But if it is cor­
rect to say that Kierkegaard’s thought and attitude
are, essentially and above all, religious, it is probably
still more true to say that what Kierkegaard’s exis­
tentialism lived on was something more than the in­
tuition of the primacy of the act of existing. But on
what? The word intuition is no longer appropriate
5 Jacques Maritain, ‘Coopération philosophique et Justice
intellectuelle,’ in Revue Thomiste, September-December,
1946 (Raison et Raisons, Chap. IV).

ECCE IN PACE

IS?

here. Let us say, rather, the dominating, devastating,
absolute sense of the mystery of the infinite tran­
scendence (attested by the Patriarchs and Proph­
ets) of Him whose Name it is impossible to pro­
nounce, placed above ‘every name that is named,
not only in this world, but also in that which is to
come’;6 let us say the ever frustrated, yet ever more
piercing thirst, the expectation (for to-day, for this
miserable existent) of that destruction of sin and of
death; that deliverance from slavery under the Law
and under the necessities of the created world; that
humiliation of ‘that which is’ and that choice of
‘that which is not’;7 and that overwhelming liberty
of which the Gospels brought us tidings.
All this, in fact, has reference to an attitude to­
wards life rather than to doctrinal pronouncement.
This meaning of the transcendence of the absolute
and this expectancy of deliverance are the vital prin­
ciple in the imprecatory attitude, in the attitude of
dramatic singularity of which I spoke earlier in con­
nection with Kierkegaard and Chestov. I by no
means maintain that their doctrine was more faith­
ful to the Old and New Testaments than that of
other thinkers, both Jewish and Christian. Far from
it! There was in them a kind of sublime aberration
fatal to doctrine, and their fault, pregnant with con­
sequences, was to believe that in order to glorify
transcendence it was necessary to destroy reason;
whereas what is necessary is to humiliate reason be­
fore the author of reason and by this act save it.
Even if the initial fault lay with Hegel, who declared
6 Ephesians I, 21. cf. Gen. XXXII, 29.
7 Cf. I Corinthians I, 28: “Et ignobilia mundi, et contemp­
tibilia elegit Deus, et ea, quae non sunt, ut ea quae sunt
destrueret."

138

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

that philosophy—his philosophy—was the ‘Science of
Good and Evil’ finally achieved, Chestov cannot be
forgiven for identifying reason with the Serpent. Yet
I think that Kierkegaard and Chestov felt more than
other men, and to the bottom of their souls, that kind
of shock or rending which leaves man no rest and
no pity, and which (while it is certainly not to be
confused with faith in the Gospels, and is sometimes,
as with Chestov, a mere desire for that faith) is
nevertheless the result of the nostalgic yearning in­
fused by the Gospels in the veins of mankind. Short
of the divine virtues there is nothing in man which
better attests his grandeur than this trepidation. It
is not by this means that philosophy accomplishes
its work. Frenzy is allowable in the prophet. It is for­
bidden to the philosopher.
Neither Kierkegaard nor Chestov was able to do
justice to the mystics. They cruelly and rather shab­
bily misunderstood them. Yet the experience and the
‘nights’ of the mystics was what they aspired to
without being aware of it. If we try to situate them
in their rightful place in the realm of the spirit, we
must turn our eyes not towards philosophy but to­
wards that apophatic contemplation in which God is
known as unknown, in the perspective of which their
efforts and their struggle derive their most genuine
significance. They found obstacles in their path
which they were unable to surmount. That path was
the path of spiritual heroism. At its end they would
have met their true companions. The place towards
which they journeyed through the shadows was that
place where souls possessed and illuminated by the
madness of the Cross give their testimony.
If, now, we examine the other existentialism, phil­
osophical or academic existentialism, in its most

ECCE IN PACE

139

typical forms, and in particular, atheistic existential­
ism, we shall see that it has rejected everything that
gave life to the ‘first existential generation.’ What
does this academic existentialism live on? What in
it constitutes that central intuition without which
there is no philosophy that is worth an hour’s trou­
ble? Being philosophical or academic, and therefore
artful and cunning, it is not surprising that it should
conceal and dissemble that intuition, and take all
sorts of means to defend itself against it. Herr
Heidegger, who is not lacking in the gift of oppor­
tunism, recently went so far as to repudiate the word
existentialism. And in the first chapter of this brief
treatise I pointed out the zeal with which atheistic
existentialism bestirs itself to render man’s condition
of useless passion’ a source of comfort to him. It re­
mains that behind the diverse strongholds which
each particular system builds for itself, the central
intuition at work in the existentialism in question is
the perfectly simple and perfectly enlightening one
of the nihil whence we come and towards which we
tend (‘All that comes from nothing,’ St. Thomas
wrote, ‘tends of itself towards nothing’8)—the intui­
tion of pure nothingness (which is the sole residue
discoverable in the creature once the Creative Ac­
tion has been suppressed) and of the radical absurd­
ity of an existence uprooted from God.
Atheistic existentialism is a philosophy, it has a
real experience of liberty, though cloudy and disap­
pointing. But spiritual experience and transcendent
apperceptions do not seem to be its strong side. Even
in the prolongations furnished it by literature and
the artistic imagination its discoveries in that order
8 De Veritate, V, 2.

140

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

have not the depth of those of, say, Marcel Jouhandeau’s novels and tales. At the same time, it is round
a certain spiritual experience that this whole philos­
ophy proliferates. If we look for the place where its
most genuine significance may be made apparent in
the realm of the spirit, we must say, I believe, that
the by no means negligible position which it occu­
pies in that realm is that of a highly elaborate met­
aphysic of the condition in which man finds himself
when he willingly espouses the nothingness out of
which he came, when he becomes a witness within
himself to the disagregation of being by nothingness,
and deliberately chooses misery because he prefers
it to not being the first (nihilating) cause in the ex­
ercise of his liberty. Just as there are, here below,
anticipations of eternal fife (which do not necessar­
ily involve a destiny) so there are anticipations of
hell. The latter play no indifferent part in the life
of man, and particularly modern man. We are bound
to acknowledge the interesting character of a philos­
ophy which, even when it strives by every means
to conceal from itself its own meaning, scrutinises
man’s condition and reconstructs the problem of be­
ing in the perspective of those anticipations. Such a
philosophy hollows out a void from which a genuine
metaphysic of being may perhaps have some chance
of coming forth.
Having made up its mind to be the sole supreme
knowledge and so to replace theology, philosophy
has for three centuries assumed the heritage and the
burdens of theology. The great modern metaphysical
systems are thus only seemingly liberated from the­
ology. The questions which the latter claimed to an­
swer continue to haunt those systems. Nowhere is
this plainer than in the philosophy of Hegel. It is

ECCE IN PACE

141

not useless to remark that atheistic existentialism it­
self remains dependent upon theology, though an in­
verted theology. For it, as for Marxism, atheism is a
point of departure accepted in advance. These two
antagonistic philosophies, the one rationalist, the
other irrationalist, both develop in the light of an
a-theo-logy of which they are the ancillae. From this
it follows that all the avenues of being are closed to
them, because they are too liable to lead in the di­
rection of the transcendent Being. However great
their hostility to idealism, those philosophies cannot
set themselves up as philosophies of being. More­
over, the very name of existentialism is, as regards
atheistic existentialism, a name usurped. Neither be­
ing nor existence: such philosophies are in reality
philosophies of action, either of praxis and the trans­
forming action of the world, or of moral creation a
nihilo and liberty for liberty’s sake. This is why the
very notion of contemplation has become unthink­
able for them, and they have no other resource than,
in the fine scorn of ignorance, to stigmatise with the
name of ‘quietism’ the highest and purest activity of
the intellect, the free activity of fruition of truth.

The Autonomy of Philosophy

35. St. Thomas distinguished in order to unite,
wherefore he distinguished only the more clearly
and powerfully. At a moment in the history of cul­
ture when Christian thought, dominated by the Au­
gustinian tradition, felt loth to make way for purely
rational disciplines, one of the principal objects of
his work was to distinguish philosophy from theology
in an irrefutable fashion and thus to establish the

142

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

autonomy of philosophy. He did succeed in estab­
lishing this autonomy in principle. After him, that
autonomy was never truly established in fact and is
not yet so established. The nominalism of the Scho­
lastics who came after St. Thomas could not but
jeopardise that autonomy when they dispossessed
metaphysics of its certitudes and allotted them ex­
clusively to the supra-rational domain of faith. The
philosophical imperialism of the great thinkers who
came after Descartes jeopardised it in another and
contrary fashion by dispossessing theological wisdom
in order to burden metaphysics and moral philoso­
phy, as I said a moment ago, with the major offices
and supreme responsibilities which theology had
had in its keeping. Philosophy thereafter took these
offices and responsibilities upon itself, at first with
vainglorious optimism but afterwards with the black
pessimism of all great disillusions. The system of
Malebranche is a theophilosophy. The monadism of
Leibnitz is a metaphysical transposition of the trea­
tise on the Angels. The morality of Kant is a philo­
sophical transposition of the Decalogue. The positiv­
ism of Auguste Comte opened out into the religion
of Humanity. The panlogism of Hegel was the su­
preme effort of modern philosophy to absorb all the
realms of the spirit into the absolutism of reason.
After that came the despair of reason, but it was a
reason still held, still wounded by the theological ob­
session which had now become an anti-theological
obsession. When Feuerbach declared that God was
the creation and the alienation of man; when Nietz­
sche proclaimed the death of God, they were the
theologians of our contemporary atheistic philoso­
phies. Why are these philosophies so charged with
bitterness, unless it is because they feel themselves

ECCE IN PACE

143

chained in spite of themselves to a transcendence
and to a past they constantly have to kill, and in the
negation of which their own roots are planted?
There is thus a curious analogy between the situa­
tion of our own age and that of the Xlllth Century.
If philosophy is to be freed from the deformities re­
sulting from an enduring servitude, either to the the­
ological heritage in the Christian régime or to the
anti-theological heritage in the atheistic régime; if
it is to win its autonomy—not only in principle but in
fact—it will still owe this boon to Aristotle and
Thomas Aquinas. Meanwhile, one should stress the
conditional character of this proposition. For up to
now—as far as Christian thought is concerned—
neither in metaphysics nor (particularly) in ethics
have the Thomists been very zealous in their effort
fully to disengage the proper structure of their phi­
losophy from the methods of approach and the
problematics of their theology. Too often their phi­
losophy makes its appearance as the transposition
into the field of reason of a theology deprived of its
own light which is faith, without, moreover, having
carried on the work of reorganisation and recasting
which would have given to the opus philosophicum
the structural constitution and intrinsic order proper
to philosophy. An authentically philosophical soul
thus animates a body which it has not completely
shaped and moulded and which is not expressly pro­
portioned to it. Besides, we have no reassurance that
the theologians of our own age will not commit the
same mistake as their ancestors of the XIVth Cen­
tury. Will they not prefer perhaps to try for a time
to keep their hold on men’s minds, and maintain a
kind of theological imperialism, rather than put the
weapons and wholesome distinctions of St. Thomas

Izf4

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

to work? Will they not try perhaps to incorporate
into theology itself and utilise for theological ends
any themes whatever of the philosophy of their
time ( sweetened and watered down, of course, and
adapted to the requirements of faith) rather than
leave to a philosophy genuinely equipped with St.
Thomas’s principles the leisure to develop in its au­
tonomous field, leave to it, also, the task of rescuing
from the modern systems the truths from which the
latter draw their momentary strength?
We are still less assured, in another connection,
that the philosophers—yesterday rationalistic, to-day
atheistic—who carry on the modern tradition, will
be capable of being regenerated in the primordial
intuitions of reason and the articulated disciplines
of a philosophy unquestionably liberated from the
chains of all pseudo-theology and anti-theology.
For in fact—and here is where the shoe pinches—
the order and laws of the things of the spirit are in­
violable. Philosophy will never truly free itself from
all deforming servitude to the theological or the antitheological heritage, will never be truly autonomous,
unless it recognise the existence and value proper to
theology, and thereby preserve its own autonomy
(which is not supreme) by the free and normal
avowal of its infravalence in comparison with the
wisdoms that are higher than it. St. Thomas estab­
lished philosophy in its own domain. He distin­
guished it from theology with a clarity and a firm­
ness that cannot be broken. But he did so only by
ensuring cohesion in difference and by affirming the
intrinsic superiority of theological wisdom over met­
aphysical wisdom, and of mystical wisdom over the­
ological wisdom. There is nothing to be done about
this order, because it does not depend upon us. Only

ECCE IN PACE

145

on the condition that we respect it can we preserve,
at every degree, the autonomy of each and all the
forms of knowing.
Yet these considerations, which concern essences
or quiddities, are still not sufficient. The conditions
or requirements of the existential order must also be
taken into account. Thomist principles not only
carry distinction and unity into the ordering of
knowledge. They also disclose the quickening and
strengthening which each degree receives from the
others in the existential context and concrete reality
of the life of the spirit. They oblige us to realise how,
at the immaterial node of the soul’s energies, mysti­
cal wisdom and theological wisdom vivify and for­
tify metaphysical wisdom just as the latter itself
vivifies and fortifies philosophical activities of a
lower rank.9
Here arises the question hotly debated a few years
ago concerning what we must call Christian philos­
ophy although that name is ambiguous. It may be
described as Christian, not on account of its essence,
indeed, but only on account of its state or conditions
of existence. This is the case in the domain of specu­
lative philosophy. Or it may be described as Chris­
tian on account of the use which it makes, within
its very texture, of truths of another order estab­
lished in theology by reason of the existential state
of its very subject (human conduct). This is the case
in the domain of moral philosophy. I have discussed
elsewhere this question of Christian philosophy10
and shall confine myself here to remarking that St.
9 Cf. Science et Sagesse, ch. Ill and ‘Elucidations.’ Eng.
trans., pp. 70-136, 228-362.
10 Cf. J. Maritain, De la philosophie chrétienne and Sci­
ence et Sagesse.

Izf6

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

Thomas, without explicitly dealing with it, took an
extremely clear position on it. He affirmed this po­
sition not only by his principles but by his action,—
by fighting and suffering; for his whole battle was
to gain recognition for Aristotle and to overthrow
Averroës, which is to say, to gain recognition of the
essential autonomy of philosophy and at the same
time to link it vitally, in its human exercise, with the
higher illumination of theological wisdom and the
wisdom of the saints. ‘If today there are Thomist
writers who are shocked by the very idea of a Chris­
tian philosophy, this simply proves that one can re­
peat a master’s formula without knowing of what
spirit one is, and that Thomism, like every other
great doctrine, can be dissected like a corpse by pro­
fessors of anatomy instead of being thought by phi­
losophers.’11

Philosophy and Spiritual Experience

36. Whatever the subject dealt with in the pre­
ceding pages, whether it was the primacy of the act
of existing in metaphysics and in the theory of
knowledge; or, in moral philosophy, the fundamen­
tally existential character of the judgment of con­
science and the judgment of prudence and the ex­
istential finalities of moral philosophy itself; or the
central importance accorded to the existent and the
subject in the universe of being; or the theory of
evil and the part attributable to the free existent and
to the frailties of his liberty in the perspectives which
Thomist principles open to us upon the eternal
11 Cf. De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, p.

317.

ECCE IN PACE

147

purposes—we have seen how the existentialism of
Thomas Aquinas differs from modern existentialism,
both because it is rational in type and because, being
founded upon the intuitiveness of the senses and the
intellect, it associates and identifies being and in­
telligibility at every point. Descartes and the whole
rationalist philosophy born of the Cartesian revolu­
tion raised a wall of insuperable enmity between in­
tellect and mystery, and this is doubtless the deep­
est source of the fundamental inhumanity of every
civilisation based upon rationalism. St. Thomas rec­
onciles intellect and mystery at the core of being, at
the core of existence. He thereby liberates our in­
tellect, restores it to its nature by restoring it to its
object. Thereby, also, he makes it possible for us to
effect unity within ourselves, and, without having to
repudiate reason and philosophy, to win liberty and
peace, though in regions which transcend philoso­
phy and which are not to be reached by any path
of philosophy.
We are here in the presence of the most significant
privilege of that great zeal for being which animates
Thomist thought and renders it so desperately nec­
essary while at the same time so foreign and intol­
erable to the emptied, exasperated, ailing reason of
our time. Thomist thought is a creator of unity; we
cherish dispersion. It is a creator of liberty; we go in
quest of any sort of collective yoke. It is a creator
of peace; and violence is our preference. The ills that
rend us are what we love most in the world. We do
not want to be set free.
And yet the great dumb ox out of Sicily began to
bellow through the world very long ago, and he is
not going to stop as soon as all that. It is open to ev­
ery man, if he so choose, to listen to him. If his spirit

148

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

and his doctrine tend to create unity in man it is al­
ways by virtue of the same secret—which is to un­
derstand all things in the light and the generosity
of being. Nature and grace, faith and reason, the­
ology and philosophy, the supernatural virtues and
the natural virtues, wisdom and science, speculative
energies and the practical energies, the world of
metaphysics and the world of ethics, the world of
knowledge and of poetry and of mystical silence—
St. Thomas scrupulously recognises the domain and
the rights appertaining to each of these constellations
in the human heavens; but he does not tear them
asunder. In his existential perspective he establishes
upon diversity a unity which is that of the Image of
God, and he causes all our powers to converge in a
synergy which saves and stimulates our whole be­
ing.12 He is at the opposite pole from Hegel, who
disunited all things and sowed war among them by
placing the universality of being in the anti-existen­
tialist perspective of an absolute idealism, and by en­
deavouring to subject all things to the unity of the
great cosmogonical Idol in which contradictories are
coupled for monstrous begettings, and where Being
and Nothingness are made one.
37. We should be grateful to Kierkegaard and his
successors for having, in their fight against Hegel,
taught anew, to those who profess to be thinkers,
the great lesson of anguish; and in particular for hav­
ing reminded the disciples of St. Thomas of that
great lesson. The mortal danger run by those whose
doctrine mounts towards the heights of unity and
peace is that they may think they have reached their
12 Cf. De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, p. 316.

ECCE IN PACE

Mg

goal when they have only started on the path, and
that they may forget that for man and his thought,
peace is always a victory over discord, and unity the
reward of wrenchings suffered and conquered.
Thomist peace and unity bear no relation to the
facile balancings and the dialectical conciliations
practiced by a reason installed in the security of an
apparatus of ready-made answers that come forth at
the click of every imaginable question. They call for
never-ending triumphs over ceaselessly recurring
conflicts. They require involvement in the thick of
new questions in order to bring forth a fresh intuition
of new truths, or cause old truths newly penetrated
to gush forth from the rock of acquired knowing.
They demand communion with all the strivings of
research and discovery to release into the light that
truth which those strivings ordinarily attain only
with the help of the ferments of error, or in ill-fated
conceptualisations. They exact from man a tension
and an extension which, in truth, are possible only
in the anguish of the Cross. For what St. Paul said
is true also in the order of the things of the spirit:
there is no redemption without the shedding of
blood. The reconciliation of the supreme energies of
intelligence and of life which, like every appetite
for the absolute, are naturally ferocious, each claim­
ing everything for itself, is a false reconciliation if
it is not also a redemption; and it cannot be accom­
plished except at the price of an ordeal of suffering
of which the spirit itself is the locus.13
As a philosophical category, anguish is worthless.
It is not the stuff out of which a philosophy is made
any more than it is the stuff they make divers’ suits
13 Cf. De Bergson à Thomas d’Aquin, pp. 133-134.

150

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

out of. It happens that anguish is found inside a
diver’s suit, but it does not enter into its composition.
Anguish is the lot of subjectivity. It is in the philoso­
pher, not in his philosophy. If it passes into his phi­
losophy, the reason is that his philosophy has been
infected by his ego, and also because his ego has
found this means of soothing itself. To excogitate
anguish is more comfortable than to suffer it.
Where is there a philosopher for whom anguish is
not the companion of his destiny? To beat our heads
against the wall when the why? escapes us is nothing
extraordinary. The longing for death always comes
when the work of pouring truths into the mould of
our truest words seems to be treason to truth. Happy
are they whose anguish has been transfigured by the
purity of tears. The biographers of St. Thomas tell
us that he wept much: the masterpiece of serenest
objectivity was born in the tears of a saint. St.
Thomas did not work in peace but in conflict and
in haste (and what are we all but men condemned
to die, hastening strangely to pronounce our mes­
sage before passing on to the place where all mes­
sages are useless and where all things are visible in
their nakedness?). He was so anxious to know, that
he pressed his brow against the altar to find the
light, and disturbed Peter and Paul to obtain from
them enlightenment on his doubts. For he was re­
sponsible for the heaviest of tasks: he had to carry,
to orientate, to realign without losing the least scrap
of it, the whole universe of Christian thought for the
time to come; and the least fault would have meant
the ruin of everything. Meanwhile there were his at­
tentive colleagues, who spied upon his every move
and sought every occasion to tumble his work into
some ditch of the cemetery of heresies—and did in

ECCE IN PACE

ISI

fact succeed in having his doctrine condemned at
Paris and at Oxford when he was no longer there
to defend it. Was this why he wept? He wept as he
gazed at the mystery of being; he wept because he
saw enough to faint under the flood of that which
he did not see.
This is a thing very far beyond anguish. Anguish
is no more than one form of the spiritual experience
of the philosopher. In proportion as he goes forward,
the philosopher moves through other states: he
knows the intellectual joy (into which nothing hu­
man penetrates ) of decisive intuitions and illuminat­
ing certainties—a sort of intoxication with the object
which is almost cruel—and sometimes the freezing
exaltation of the glance that denudes and destroys;
and sometimes the revulsion of handling those ani­
mal skeletons and bones of the dead of which Goe­
the speaks; and sometimes the ardour which wounds
him on every side for the infinite search which men
carry on and for all captive truths; sometimes the
pity for error with its ambiguities; and sometimes the
great solitude or distress of the spirit; and sometimes
the sweetness of going forward in the maternal
night. What I should like to stress is that the spiritual
experience of the philosopher is the nourishing soil
of philosophy; that without it there is no philosophy;
and that, even so, spiritual experience does not, or
must not, enter into the intelligible texture of phi­
losophy. The pulp of the fruit must consist of noth­
ing but the truth.
And now, if it is true that philosophy tends to go
beyond itself in order to attain to the silence of unity,
where it will harvest all that it knows in a purer and
more transparent light, what is the experience in
which it (whose first object is the world and man)

152

EXISTENCE AND THE EXISTENT

can cause the spirit of man thus to expand, unless it
be the experience of the gift of knowledge? Then
will man attain peace, then will he be able to say,
ecce in pace amaritudo mea amarissima. What the
gift of knowledge produces, according to John of St.
Thomas,14 is a certain experience or a taste of crea­
tures which detaches us from them, a spiritual ex­
perience of created being which induces in us a
yearning for God. ‘Thou art the Lord our God. In
very deed the hills were liars, and the multitude of
the mountains. Behold, we come to thee . . .’1B To
what truer knowledge can the philosopher lay claim?
He will have received his due when, one day, not by
the discourse of reason but by a simple and intimate
experience—in which all seems said, and in which
compassion is made one with detachment—he will
know that beings, with all their beauty, differ from
the infinite Being more than they resemble Him.
When he will know how great is the abandonment
of those who, to hold the created being within reach,
were forced to scale the glaciers of the void where
they see everywhere the void. When he will know
that there is nothing more despised and rejected
among men than the truth he loves, and will feel
that for that truth every opportunity is a lost oppor­
tunity, and that its highest messages, if they are
purely human, influence history only as a nudge to
the blind and only when they can no longer be
deciphered. When he will discern the irrefutable
meaning of the mihi videtur ut palea and perceive
that all that men have said about being and God
must seem to the saints like a bundle of straw, and
14 Jean de St. Thomas, Les Dons du Saint-Esprit, trans­
lated by Raïssa Maritain, Paris, 1930, pp. 169-179.

15 Jeremiah III, 22-23.

ECCE IN PACE

ISS

that the wisp which each man strives with so much
labour to add to the bundle will not serve him, for
it is according to his love that he will be judged.
When he will understand that all the treasures of the
intelligibility of being, all the glory of the act of ex­
isting, and the savour of the existent which he so
much wished to taste, have always regarded him
with infinite indifference and never wished to give
themselves to him. For it was he who, by the law of
the human intellect focussing its light upon the
booty of the senses, had sought to seize those treas­
ures by piercing the veil for a single instant. There­
fore from the beginning he accepted disappoint­
ment, for we incur inevitable disappointment when
we seek to take that which refuses to give itself. The
hills may have been bars, but it was not the hills that
disappointed him. One day the hills will surrender
themselves, everything will surrender itself to the in­
telligence of man on the day when the self-subsistent
Act of Existing shall give Itself in vision.

Rome, January-April, 1947.

Image Books
. o . MAKING THE WORLD’S FINEST
CATHOLIC LITERATURE AVAILABLE TO ALL
OUR LADY OF FATIMA

JOYCE KILMER'S ANTHOLOGY OF

By William Thomas Walsh
DI—750

THE SPIRIT OF CATHOLICISM

By Karl Adam

With a new supplement
James Edward Tobin
BERNADETTE AND LOURDES

D3—850

By Michel de Saint-Pierre
DI 6—850

A POPULAR HISTORY OF THE
CATHOLIC CHURCH

By Philip Hughes

THE IMITATION OF CHRIST
Di—950

MR. BLUE

By Myles Connolly

by

DI 5—$1.25

B2—850

DAMIEN THE LEPER

By John Farrow

CATHOLIC POETS

05—65 0

THE DIARY OF A COUNTRY PRIEST

By Georges Bernanos

06—75¡¡

By Thomas à Kempis. A Mod­
ern Version edited with an In­
troduction by Harold C. Gar­
diner, S.J.
Bl 7—850
THE EVERLASTING MAN

THE CHURCH SPEAKS TO THE

By G. K. Chesterton

MODERN WORLD':

A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT

The Social Teachings of Leo
XIII. Edited by Etienne Gilson

By John Henry Cardinal Newman with an Introduction b_
Etienne Gilson
019—$1.21

07—950
PEACE OF SOUL

By Fulton J. Sheen

BROTHER PETROC’S RETURN
D8—850

LIFT UP YOUR HEART

By Fulton J. Sheen

D18—950

By S. M. C.

021—75?

ST. FRANCIS OF ASSISI
D9—850

By Johannes Jorgensen

STORM OF GLORY

D22—95j

The Story of St. Thérèse of
Lisieux. By John Beevers
DIO—750

THE PERFECT JOY OF ST. FRANCIS

STORIES OF OUR CENTURY BY
CATHOLIC AUTHORS

Edited by John Gilland Brunini and Francis X. Connolly

By Felix Timmermans

D23—95
Dll—850

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A HUNTE!

SAINTS FOR OUR TIMES

PRIEST

By Theodore Maynard

By John Gerard. Introduction
by Graham Greene
D24—950

DI 2—950

INTRODUCTION TO THE DEVOUT
LIFE

By St. Francis de Sales. Newly
translated and edited by John
K. Ryan
013—950
THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

Edited by John A. O’Brien
DI 4—750

FATHER

MALACHY’S MIRACLE

By Bruce Marshall

D25—750

ON THE TRUTH OF THE CATHOLIC

Summa Contra Gen­
tiles Book I: God. Newly trans­
lated, with Introduction and
notes by Anton C. Pegis
FAITH

D26—950

6