Existential Confernment and Passive Potency

It may be said that an entity which has no passive potency cannot receive any existence; and, likewise, one may say that an essent cannot recieve any existence because it is already fully existence itself.

This calls into question a deeper issue: how do we even evaluate existential-confernment? When we predicate normal properties, it is easy to account for that cause of attribution: e.g., this apple is gold because I spray painted it. However, how does the giving of existence work?

We can make some sense of the giving of existence to existents in terms of immediate causality (e.g., the chair cannot exist without its legs and the legs cannot continue to be a chair’s leg without the form of the chair); but that ’transfer’ or ‘conveyence’ is just the eduction of a form out of matter in this case. How would that work when we think of the confernment of existence from pure act (e.g., the ex nihilo creation of an apple by God)?

We can think of existential confernment in two different ways. The first, the giving of existence is like the giving of water to an empty cup: the cup is filled with water until it can hold no more. The second, the giving of existence is like the pouring of volumeless color dye into a cup that is already full of water. Depending on how we view it, we reach drastically different results.

In the case of the first, the water is existence and the cup is the entity receiving it. It is clear that once an entity is full of existence they can no longer receive more (viz., the water overflows once the cup is full); and the entity has a real potential to receive more existence when it is not (viz., an empty cup can really be filled more). However, this causes contradictions with what we already know about God. To begin with, God creates ex nihilo from pure act and this necessitates that the existent to be created does not previously exist to being created. If the existent does not previously exist, then it has no real potency—passive or active. If it has no real potency, then it does not receive existence as a passive potential being actualized. In turns out, every creation by definition is not given existence in a manner that invokes change; and, thusly, it is disanalogous to the water cup example. Beyond that, God’s self-knowledge and simplicity cause Him to confer existence to Himself. If an entity which lacks passive potency cannot receive existence, then God fails at His Nature in His attempt to give Himself (more) existence; and if He gives Himself (more) existence because He cannot fail, then, under this water cup analogy, He has passive potency which violates His Nature. Consequently, this analogical understanding of existential confernment is not viable.

On the other hand, the case of the second, the cup and water are the entity in essence and the color dye is existence. We can see clearly how in this analogy an entity could receive existence when it it already full (viz., water fully colored red can still be given more red dye without the color changing); and existential confernment does not require passive potency (viz., the fully dyed water lacks any further capacity to change color but still can receive more). We see, then, that the pure act of creation is like that of providing an essence with existence like giving water color: e.g., the apple is not changed by God initially creating it out of nothing but, rather, is supplied with the backdrop to have passive potency at all. It is like a color dye that makes an object visible: the color dye doesn’t add anything to what it is to be that object, but in adding it the object now can been seen. The issues we had with the other analogy dissipate: God can receive existence from Himself without changing, and creation happens without passive potency.

Now, it may be objected that one could also posit matter as coeternal with God to solve this; but that fails for reasons covered in “Proportionate Causality in the Essent”.