Natural theology and ‘onto-theology’

As a first step in response to what seems to be a widespread and general hostility to ‘natural theology’ we must next begin a long process of consideration of two particular forms that the criticism takes, sometimes linked, sometimes not, as directed at some key high and late medieval theologians, including, some say, Thomas Aquinas, while others find them in Duns Scotus but not in Thomas. The first accusation is that of the theological error which, since Martin Heidegger, is described as ‘onto-theology’, an egregious offence committed by those, if indeed there are any who commit it, who suppose that there is some ‘common conception of being’ – or at least, some excessive degree of ‘continuity of being’ – of which common conception, duly differentiated by the distinction between infinite and finite being, God and created things are instances, or ‘beings’. That, at any rate, is one opinion of what the error consists in, for Philip Blond says that an onto-theologian ‘elevate[s] a neutral account of being above the distinction between the Creator and his creatures, allowing both God and finite beings to share in this being in due proportion’. But in recent times the accusation seems to have been levelled with little discrimination as to its exact nature, for, on the contrary, Lawrence Hemming in the same collection of essays tells us that ‘onto-theology’ is the error of asserting that ‘God as univocal primum ens is the same as being’ and that ‘God is not subsumed under being where being is a separate (and so higher) category from God, but that God as highest (infinite) being subsumes all created things as univocally dependent on him’.