Abstract
Adrian Pabst,
Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, 2012; 560 pp.: 9780802864512, £35.99/$55.00 (pbk)
The way we think about how an individual thing is ‘one’ affects the way we think about God. And the way we think about God affects the way we think about how an individual thing is ‘one’. This is Adrian Pabst’s radical thesis.
‘Radical’ is the appropriate word here, for his project in many ways represents the most comprehensive attempt to justify historically the claims of Radical Orthodoxy. Metaphysics is theological at its core. Only a Triune God can account for the individuation of things in a way that respects the absolute unity of their shared source of being and the diverse multiplicity of their particular instantiations.
Pabst argues that it was precisely the encounter between biblical revelation and Greco-Roman philosophy that allowed human reason to develop an ontology of individuation surpassing all prior and subsequent attempts. Finite beings are irreducibly related to one another and their transcendent source of being. The form of a thing does not so much constitute it as an individual substance as position it in relation to other things. In fact, finite things intimate a first principle and a final end that is itself relational. Pabst claims that by reconnecting individuality with relationality we avoid a false opposition between the one and the many.
The book is divided into three parts. The first presents a key difference between Aristotle and Plato. Aristotle’s Prime Mover is so detached from the world that the source of individuation must be posited in things themselves. Plato favours a metaphysics according to which the forms of finite things, as perfections, participate intrinsically in the transcendent form of the Good. The second part of the book reviews the medieval tendency to account for individuation by exalting essence over existence. Pabst credits Aquinas for restoring a Neo-Platonic metaphysic. The third part moves into the modern period and includes a fascinating discussion of how the exaltation of substance over relation influences political theory. Pabst argues that if we are created in the image and likeness of God then we share in Trinitarian relationality and are thus inherently ordered to one another. Laws and virtues are constitutive of our partaking in the good life. If, in contrast, we reduce ourselves to individual substances, then we lose sight of genuine economic reciprocity and the appropriate role of government.
This book goes a long way to reclaim the importance of a participatory metaphysics for philosophy and theology. But it goes too far. A strong counterargument can be made that participation is founded on being as analogically divided by act and potency. This, pace Pabst, entails a priority of substance over relation. To be related, a thing must first exist. For a thing to exist means for it to be a potency-limited act. And it is only by knowing a thing as potency-limited act that we infer the reality of the first cause. All of this implies a certain autonomy of philosophy that Pabst and other members of the Radical Orthodoxy movement staunchly deny.