Jack Boczar

In recent years, a considerable amount of interest has arisen in the topic of existential inertia (henceforth EIT) and its relation to the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas. While contemporary Thomists have engaged with proponents of EIT, strangely enough, no literature has focused on Aquinas’s own response to the objection(s) from an EIT-like position. The intention of this article is to (1) lay out the basic thrust of EIT and then (2) articulate how Aquinas’s own metaphysical commitments dissolve the problems that EIT raises. After formulating an argument based on Aqunias’s own texts and paying attention to the metaphysical commitments it involves, I then level three objections and respond to them.

This present article examines an argument in Aquinas’s De potentia, q. 3, a. 9, in which Aquinas argues that the human soul must be created by God. After introducing the relevance of the problem and discussing the state of the literature, I lay out Aquinas’s argument and defend it by appealing to his broader metaphysical commitments. I then turn to two difficulties raised in the literature by B.C. Bazan and Lawrence Joseph Kaiser. Bazan argues that Aquinas’s claim that the human soul must be created by God leads to internal inconsistencies within Aquinas’s metaphysical system. While not explicitly criticizing Aquinas, Kaiser’s account of the eduction of forms from matter also raises a few problems for the consistency of Aquinas’s claim. In response to Bazan and Kaiser, I argue that a firm grasp of Aquinas’s semantics dissolves the criticisms.