Thomas and Relationality

In Adrian Pabst’s interpretation, creation is for Thomas “that event by which the infinity of united ‘definiteness’ is converted into the finitude of composite ‘definiteness.’” That is, creation is not “generality” moving into particularity but infinite definiteness “converted” into finite. Because of this “individual things reflect in particular and diverse ways the universal triunity of their Creator whose goodness individuates all beings relationally” – relationally because it is only by virtue of their relation with God that they are individual beings at all. Thomas thus claims that by creation God “brings everything into being and makes it in the image and likeness of the relational Godhead” ( Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy , 251).

Pabst sees this relationality in three dimensions: “horizontally,” all beings share a “common being”; there is a “vertical asymmetrical relationality of created being to God upon which the horizontal relation depends”; and at the origin there is “the absolutely symmetric relationality between the Trinitarian persons” (251).

On the first, “horizontal” relationality, he cites a passage from the Summa Contra Gentiles :

“The communication of being and goodness arises from goodness. This is evident from the very nature and definition of the good. By nature, the good of each thing is its act and perfection. Now each thing acts in so far as it is in act, and in acting it diffuses being and goodness to other things. Hence it is a sign of a being’s perfection that it ‘can produce its like.’”

Pabst comments that this passage indicates that for Thomas “created things . . . are not isolated self-contained entities but instead relational beings.” In contrast to Aristotle, who limits “the Good to the status of final cause,” Thomas “extends it to formal and efficient causality.”

Thus, in the created order of horizontal relations among created things, “being ( esse ) is relational in the sense that actuality pours over into action which is not confined to the individual self but extends to other beings too, establishing relations among them. The self-diffusiveness of created esse implies that all things are always already relational because to be in act is to act upon other beings at the same time as being acted upon by them.” This “metaphysical relationality” is the “source for the interconnectedness throughout the cosmos,” and in human life this “translates into practicing relations that establish human association at all levels, from the family and the household via communities to a common polity.” Thus, Thomas’s metaphysics of creation open out into a political theory centered on a notion of common good – since the relations among things are grounded in their common share in the Good that is God (254-5).

For Thomas, then, “everything is what it is not through itself but in relation to other things by receiving them and by giving itself to them . . . . The mode of communication and relation amongst created things is perhaps best described as a dynamic of self-reception and return” (257).