Kenny's Critique of Divine Simplicity

Anthony Kenny was right (in his The Five Ways) to connect the Fourth Way with the claim (first stated by St. Thomas in the early De Ente et Essentia) that God is identical to His own act of existence. I think that he’s also right in thinking that St. Thomas did not change his theory of esse (act of existence) but did change his understanding of essence or quiddity. In De Ente, Aquinas did not distinguish between understanding the meaning of a word (like ‘phoenix’) and grasping the essence of the kind of thing that the word names. In fact, if there are no phoenixes, it is impossible for us to grasp the essence of a phoenix. This does undercut St. Thomas’s first argument for the real distinction between essence and existence in De Ente, but, in my opinion, this is no great loss. The real case for the distinction lies in the fact that there can be only one thing whose essence is its existence. Hence, the real distinction is easy to establish for everything but God.
 
Kenny approaches the problem as you would expect a mid-20th-century analytic philosopher to do so: from a grammatical-linguistic analysis of the verb ‘to be’ (and ‘est’ in Latin). Not surprisingly, he concludes that St. Thomas’s account of God is “unintelligible”. Aquinas’s strategy is to argue that we are forced to the “unintelligible” conclusion by the facts of causation and the natural world. The exceptional nature of God is a feature, not a bug. It is not surprising if the grammar of ordinary language finds it difficult to accommodate the conclusion.
 
I thought it was surprising that Kenny doesn’t mention Exodus 3 in this context, in which God tells Moses that His name is “I am that I am,” which (as St. Thomas notes) is a striking anticipation of Thomas’s theory. The phrase “that I am” clearly refers to God’s act of existence, and the phrase “I am…” in this context clearly asks for a phrase delineating God’s nature or essence.
 
The second thing that Kenny fails to take into account is that Aquinas’s theory of ‘esse’ and ‘actus essendi’ (acts of existence) is a substantive metaphysical proposal, not merely an analysis of ordinary language and thought. Aquinas is offering an interesting and attractive theory about actuality, something that philosophers have wrestled with from antiquity to the present time. How are my actual daughters different from all of the possible but not actual daughters that I could have had? There have been relatively few accounts of this fact in the history of philosophy:
 

• Actualism. There is no such thing as a non-actual daughter. Talk about such things must be paraphrased as talk about our ideas or suppositions.
• Mysterious quality. There is a special, ineffable quality that all and only actual things have.
• Kantianism. To be actual is to be connected in appropriate ways to sensations (as opposed to acts of imagination or supposition).
• Leibnizian optimism. To be actual is to be a denizen of the best possible world.
• Thomism. To be actual is to contain an act of existence (actus essendi). These acts of existence are all exactly the same, with one exception—all but God are cases of participated existence, while God is the unique case of unparticipated existence.
• Centrality. To be actual is to belong to the central portion of reality, upon which all merely potential realities depend (by being related to the powers or dispositions of actual things).

 
It’s easy to dispose of options 2, 3, and 4. We have no acquaintance with any actual-ish quality, and even if we did, it would be easy to conceive of non-actual things with that quality (disposing of 2). Kant’s attempted definition ignores the fact that it is only actual sensations that are relevant to the actuality of a physical thing, rendering his definition of ‘actual’ viciously circular (disposing of 3). Being part of the best possible world intuitively has nothing to do with being actual. If God chooses to make the best possible world actual, He must do something. Being best isn’t sufficient to make it actual on its own (disposing of 4).
 
I don’t think 6 is really a competitor with 5. Necessary beings (like God) are essentially “central” in this way, so 6 would provide some basis for identifying God as actual. However, many actual things are contingent. This means that although they are in fact metaphysically central, they could have been peripheral. We still need an explanation of what makes one contingent thing metaphysically central and another peripheral.
 
So, that leaves only 1 and 5. Aristotelians will reject 1 (actualism) on the ground that it denies the metaphysical significance of the actuality/potentiality distinction. If everything non-actual is completely unreal, then we face the Parmenidean problem of explaining how substantial change (generation and corruption of substances in nature) is possible. Even more importantly, we cannot treat active powers or passive potencies to change as aspects of reality. If something has the potential to become hot, for example, this consists in the thing’s having a real relation to a merely potential accident of heat. If there are no merely potential entities, then we would have to embrace some form of Platonic realism, understanding the potentiality for heat as a relation to the universal idea of Heat Itself.
 
Kenny puts a great deal of emphasis on Aquinas’s principle that everything receives its existence through its form. Thus, for Socrates to exist, existence must come to Socrates through his form of humanity. Consequently, Socrates cannot exist without being a living human being. Thus, for Socrates, to be is to be human, a living human being. However, Aquinas’s theory is that this is true only of creatures. God does not receive His existence from anything. Consequently, it does not have to come to Him through any limiting form. His existence is simple, unqualified, and unlimited. For God to be is simply for God to be, full stop.
 
As Kenny notes, Aquinas insists that God’s existence is not the greatest-common-factor kind of existence that is common to every actual thing (SCG I.26). That kind of generic existence is shared by both God and creatures—in God it is unlimited, in creatures it is limited by essence. God’s existence is the sort that is incompatible with any kind of limitation or restriction.