Abstract

Anof a Thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the University of Toronto. ;Common views are often accepted uncritically. In Thomistic studies opinions have been transmitted from one generation of scholars to another without question as to their soundness. One such opinion bears on the problem whether St. Thomas Aquinas in any way held that creative power can be communicated to creatures, as alleged in some philosophical traditions he had to face. ;The present study argues that Aquinas never held the possibility of this communication of creative power, though he recognized the grounds on which others based it. In support of that conclusion a pertinent group of texts from the Scriptum on the Sentences and from the Liber de causis on creation are collected and analysed in this dissertation. ;The dissertation is sensitive to the absence as well as the presence of texts upon this problem in the various works of Aquinas. In his earlier work, for instance, Aquinas was alert to Peter Lombard's view on the communicability of creative power, although silent on it in his later writings. ;Both methods, metaphysical analysis and historicocritical investigation, have resulted in the firm conclusion that not even in his early career did Aquinas accept communicability of creative power as possible in his own metaphysics of existence. He acknowledged, however, that a different type of metaphysical thought could fail to show the impossibility of this communication. In this way the dissertation shows that Aquinas never admitted the communicability of creative act to creatures, neither in the Scriptum nor in any other early writing