Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

his distinction between essence and existence. According to this Avicennan teaching, the nature or essence of each created thing leaves open whether or not that thing exists. This is why such things need causes in the first place. They are insufficient to account for their own existence and need help from some external influence if they are to be brought into being. By contrast, God’s essence guarantees, or even is identical to, His own existence.5 This is what it means to say that God exists necessarily, whereas all other things exist contingently: in itself, each of them could have failed to exist, and exists only because of the chain of causes that goes back to God. Albert is broadly happy with this picture, but is more reluctant than Avicenna to say that existence is bestowed by God only indirectly.6 He would like to say that when God creates being, He is creating the being of all things. But how to secure this while still obeying the maxim “from one only one”? The answer is simple: the being produced by God is in itself one but becomes complex and diversified precisely when it joins to the essences of created things, as Avicenna described. In a further borrowing from his Neoplatonic sources, Albert compares God to a flowing fountain or shining light, with being as a single stream or irradiation which is received by many things. The Neoplatonists and Avicenna held that God produces an intellect and uses it as an intermediary to create other things, but Albert doesn’t w...