¹ For consistency, I follow the conventional usage of the acronym found in the literature.

² Joe Schmid, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs (Cham, CH: Springer, 2022), p. 107. Schmid rightly points out here that there is mutual exclusivity in terms of the domain and modal quantification of EIT. Schmid points out that Paul Audi’s formulation, for instance, claims that EIT applies to everything, while Adler and Feser formulate it as applying only to contingent things.

³ Ibid., pp. 105–27.

⁴ Ibid., pp. 83–03.

⁵ Ibid., pp. 131–84.

⁶ Ibid, pp. 83–85.

⁷ Joe Schmid, ‘Existential Inertia and the Aristotelian Proof’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 89 (2020), 201–20; Graham Oppy, ‘On Stage One of Feser’s “Aristotelian Proof”’, Religious Studies, 57 (2021), 491–502. Recently McNabb (2024) has brought up EIT in the context of defending the ‘Aristotelian Proof’. While my current article goes beyond McNabb’s in being focused solely on EIT rather than the Aristotelian proof, two things are worth mentioning. First, McNabb does an excellent job in showing the relationship between EIT and the Aristotelian argumentation put forth in recent literature. Second, McNabb provides fruitful ground for future work by discussing two notions related to the EIT debate: (1) the specification of efficient causality and (2) the relationship between physical and metaphysical components of a substance. Engaging with these topics would take me far beyond the scope of the present article and into the territory of Aquinas’s transformation of the efficient cause in Aristotle through the reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, but see Gilson (1958) for a start, and In I Sent., d. 37, q. 1, a. 1, resp. for an insightful use of Avicenna in the context of EIT related issues.

⁸ Jordan Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 175–79.

⁹ Schmid, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs, pp. 236–52; Gaven Kerr, ‘Existential Inertia and the Thomistic Way to God’, in Collected Articles on the Existence of God, ed. by Gaven Kerr (London, EG: Editiones Scholasticae, 2022), pp. 77–96; Gaven Kerr, ‘Aquinas’s Argument for God in the De Ente et Essentia’ in ibid., pp. 97–138.

¹⁰ Schmid, Existential Inertia and Classical Theistic Proofs, pp. 265–364.

¹¹ Kerr, ‘Existential Inertia and the Thomistic Way to God’, p. 78.

¹² De Potentia, q. 5, a. 1, obj., 4 (S. Thomas Aquinatis, Quaestiones Disputatae, t. 2: Quaestiones disputatae de potentia, ed. by P. M. Pession, 10th edn (Marietti, Taurini-Romae, 1965)): ‘Deus est causa rerum sicut efficiens. Sed cessante actione causae efficientis, remanet effectus; sicut cessante actione aedificatoris, remanet domus, et cessante actione ignis generantis, adhuc remanet ignis generatus. Ergo et cessante omni Dei actione, adhuc possunt creaturae in esse remanere’. (All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.)

¹³ De Potentia, q. 5, a. 1, ad 4: ‘Dicendum, quod huiusmodi inferiora agentia sunt causa rerum quantum ad earum fieri, non quantum ad esse rerum per se loquendo. Deus autem per se est causa essendi: et ideo non est simile. Unde Augustinus dicit: non enim sicut structuram cum fabricaverit quis abscedit, atque illo cessante et abscedente stat opus eius; ita mundus vel in ictu oculi stare poterit, se ei Deus regimen suum subtraxerit’.

¹⁴ In II Sent., d. 2, q. 1, a. 2, resp., ‘… not only does faith hold that there is creation but reason also demonstrates it’. See also De Substantiis Separatis, c. 8 where I think Aquinas is the most explicit in his corpus that creation as an ‘ontological category’ can, and is, proven through various arguments. This occurs in response to the Latin Averroists, who likely denied that ‘creation’ refers to anything in philosophical discourse. For them, in the domain of philosophy, there is only eternal motion.

¹⁵ The first line of reasoning he gives is an argument from the nature of efficient causality in De Potentia, q. 5, a. 1, resp. The second seems to be an argument from contingency and the principle of sufficient reason in SCG, II.30. Finally, Aquinas seems to argue from the composition of esse and essence in various places such as De Potentia, q.5, a.1 and In II Sent., d. 1., q. 1, a. 2. It also seems that he argues from the nature of God’s providential activity to the conclusion that God is a sustaining cause, but it is unclear as to whether such claims are not reducible to the other lines of argumentation mentioned above. One may wonder why the topic of God’s sustaining causality is treated in relatively few places in Aquinas’s corpus, especially since many of the modern critics of Aquinas mentioned above (n. 6) think that the failure to address something like EIT is a weak spot in Aquians’s thought. I do not think this is a failure on the part of Aquinas. While I hope to address it more in the future, consider that Aquinas has no distinction between creation and conservation in his metaphysics. Once this is understood, talk of creation just becomes talk of conservation, as there is no real distinction between the terms (see Mancha Jr., 2004). The arguments for conservation then are identical to arguments for creation, and vice versa. With this in mind, ‘conservation’ and an anti-EIT metaphysics saturates Aquinas’s work, including even his theological texts (see O’Neill, 2019).

¹⁶ What is unclear, but would require a much larger project is the relationship between (1) Aquinas’s modality and God’s creative action (see McGinnis, 2012, esp. pp. 565–74 for a start) and (2) the relationship between causation, contingency, composition, and the real distinction. With regard to the latter, is a thing caused because it is contingent, and contingent because it is composite? At what level does the composition hit rock bottom, and is composition rock-bottom spelled out in terms of esse and essence, or in terms of something else, like being and nonbeing (cf. Wippel, 1985 and Zoll, 2022)?

¹⁷ In II Sent., d. 1, q. 1, a. 2, resp., ‘Secundum est, ut in re quae creari dicitur, prius sit non esse quam esse: non quidem prioritate temporis vel durationis, ut prius non fuerit et postmodum sit; sed prioritate naturae, ita quod res creata si sibi relinquatur, consequatur non esse, cum esse non habeat nisi ex influentia causae superioris. Prius enim unicuique inest naturaliter quod non ex alio habet, quam quod ab alio habet’ (trans. Baldner & Carroll).

¹⁸ I also wish to stress that one must not read into Aquinas’s account of God’s causation the notion of concurrence, where God and the creature cooperate fully in causing the same action. This is the view of Suarez, and as Baldner (2016) has cogently shown, not the view of Aquinas, who holds that the action of God’s sustaining power takes place in an entirely different causal order than that of the creature’s power to move. This seems to be one place where Oppy (2021) mistakenly goes wrong in his criticism.

¹⁹ It seems to me that Schmid (2022) struggles to grasp the underlying account of how a thing participates esse, and for that reason fails to give a proper rendering of Aquinas’s view. See Zoll (2022) for Aquinas’s account of a thing’s participation in its own esse (esse commune).

²⁰ I recognize that Schmid (2022, pp. 236–52) has laid out an interpretation of Aquinas’s claims about esse and persistence and criticized them based on his engagement with Kerr’s article on EIT (see n. 9 above). However, I think Schmid’s interpretation suffers from problems, perhaps because he does not fully grasp Aquinas’s broader metaphysics of esse. Also, his criticisms seem to be on the weaker side as I will presently show. First, his formulation of Aquinas’s position makes no reference to God, which means that it does not establish that God sustains things in existence. This is rather important, as sustaining causality in Aquinas is always interconnected with the causality of God, and divorcing the two can easily lead to confusing Aquinas’s views on creation with Bonaventure’s (see Baldner, 1989, esp. pp. 225–27, and Baldner, 2016). Second Schmid sets up premises one and two of his argument in such a way that enables him to claim shortly thereafter that such premises are absurd. But no Thomist, and certainly not Aquinas himself, would agree to Schmid’s formulation to begin with. Third, most, if not all, of Schmid’s criticisms function as moorean defeaters, and simply beg the question against the very metaphysics that he is criticizing. I will address them briefly. Regarding the criticisms, he gives four. (1) In reference to a thing requiring esse from another, Schmid’s claim that ‘to “have existence from something ad extra” is ambiguous’ (p. 249) is simply false and showcases a misunderstanding of the position he criticizes. God’s causality of esse is both efficient and extrinsic exemplar causality. And since God is the ultimate explanation of all that is, to say that creatures have esse ad extra (from God) is to say that God is both the cause and explanation of esse. I do not see what the problem with this is, and it certainly is not a criticism of the Thomist; at best it’s a call to clarify what is meant by the Thomist’s claim. (2) Looking at another one of Schmid’s criticisms, he claims that there is a middle ground between the options of a creature having esse ad extra, and having it in virtue of what it is (pp. 248–49). In support of this, he adduces a thought experiment in which a divine entity whose essence and existence are distinct functions as the First principle of all reality. He then claims that this is a counter-example to the Thomist assumption that a thing can either (1) have esse in virtue of what it is or (2) have it ad extra. This is quite a strange assertion. Being composite, such a divine entity would necessitate an explanation and merely claiming that it is the ultimate explanation would seem to be a contradiction in terms. The very fact of its composition screams out for an explanation. A Thomist’s response would be to say that ‘an ultimate explanation of reality that is composite’ is a contradiction in terms. Schmid has (1) failed to understand what the nature of theistic explanation is (see, for starters, Phaedo 95A4–102A9 and Gerson, 2021, esp. pp. 48–87), (2) deployed a red herring that does not function as a counter-example, (3) claimed that the mere logical possibility of something being the case is sufficient to discount the original claim, and (4) failed to rule out how such a hypothetical does not collapse into bruteness, self-causation, or logical impossibility – all of which the Thomsit denies from the outset. As for criticism (3), Schmid claims that his formulation of premises one and two in the Thomistic argument entails that nothing can exist in virtue of what it is, thereby contradicting the Thomist claims about God’s esse being identical to his essence (pp. 246–47). But in doing so, it seems to me that Schmid explicitly lumps God into the category of creatures. Perhaps I have misunderstood him here, but I fail to see how he reaches his conclusion other than by assertion. Following this claim, Schmid then sets up a supposed dilemma for the De Ente argument in which he claims that proponents will fall into a catch-22 if they accept or reject the claim that in order for x to metaphysically explain y, x needs to be prior to y. This seems far-fetched, as Schmid here conflates the nature of creaturely explanation with the nature of the explanation of the First Principle. Finally, as for criticism (4), I mentioned above that Schmid’s own formulation of the argument has enabled him to set up a criticism in which his rendition of premises one and two are labeled absurd (pp. 246–47). Would it be plausible, though, that they just need to be reformulated instead of rejected? No Thomist would accept premises that entail an absurdity from the outset, and a charitable interpretation of Aquinas would avoid such a dilemma in the setup of the argument.

²¹ This claim simply follows per se nota from the concept that esse is the actulitas of all act. For anything to be, including for causation to be, it must be conditioned by esse.

²² De Potentia, q. 3, a. 4, resp.

²³ My response relies on the assumption that a real distinction does not entail separability. If it did, then essences would be able to exist apart from esse, leading to the objection (cf. Feser, 2014, esp. pp. 72–79 and pp. 246–56, and Klima, 2013).

²⁴ A further response to my counter-response could be that Aquinas’s counterfactual conditional that ‘essences, if left to themselves, would cease to exist’, simply makes no sense as it refers to nonbeing. As a result, Aquinas has no warrant to make any claims about essences. This is a difficult objection, but I think that going back to the text is helpful (see n. 15 above). Aquinas does not talk of essences in this manner. He speaks in terms of res creata, meaning the created thing, or the entire existing substance. The res creata is an existing thing, and so Aquinas can coherently speak of it. It could, however, be plausible to respond further by saying that Aquinas’s use of the res creata cannot account for our ability to speak of nonexisting essences, such as those of a Phoenix. At this point, the debate will reach the deep waters of medieval philosophy in attempting how a semantics can adequately account for the speaking of nonexisting essences. It seems to me that Aquinas has the resources to respond to such a challenge. One such way to respond is to say that while essences do not exist without esse, one can still speak of nonexisting essences because they are not total nonbeing, but relative nonbeing as related to the divine ideas in the exemplar cause, i.e., God. This brings the argument into the realm of exemplar causality, divine simplicity, and the relationship of those to predication. I am preparing a future article on this topic, but for now see Wippel (1984) for a start at investigating essences without esse and their relationship to God’s exemplar causality.

²⁵ De Potentia, q. 7, a. 2, ad 9: ‘Unde patet quod hoc quod dico esse est actualitas omnium actuum, et propter hoc est perfectio omnium perfectionum’.

²⁶ Joseph Owens, An Interpretation of Existence (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing, 1968), pp. 14–24.

²⁷ John Wippel, ‘Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines on the Reality of Nonexisting Possibles’, in Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas, ed. by John Wippel (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1984), pp. 163–89.

²⁸ God is a special case in which esse and essence are identical, cf. ST I, q. 3, a. 4.

²⁹ Joseph Owens, An Interpretation of Existence, p. 24. Owens notes just a few pages later the radical nature of this solution to what he designates the problem of existence, ‘But the genetic leap to judgment as a distinct synthesizing cognition that apprehends an existential synthesizing in the thing appears for the first time in Aquinas. It ushers in a profoundly new metaphysical starting point’.

³⁰ Hence Étienne Gilson can say in the final chapter of Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto, CA: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949), ‘A critical examination of the data provided by the history of philosophy leads to the conclusion that “to be” does not contradict being, since it is the cause of being, and that judgments do not contradict concepts, since all judgments are finally rooted in the existential act of what first falls under the apprehension of understanding, that is, being’.

³¹ Compare, for example, the view of Henry of Ghent, who distinguished between esse essentiae and esse existentiae. Aquinas explicitly does not hold to such a view, as essences are not until actualized by esse. See Gilson (1949), esp. pp. 74–79, for a general overview of this idea, and Wippel (1984) for a close look at Ghent compared to Aquinas. For the view that the real distinction does not entail separability see n. 23 above.

³² Compendium Theologiae, I.211; De Unione Verbi, Incarnati a. 2, resp.; J. L. A. West, ‘The Real Distinction Between Supposit and Nature’, in Wisdom’s Apprentice: Thomistic Essays in Honor of Lawrence Dewan, O.P., ed. by Peter Kwasniewski and Lawrence Dewan (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2007), pp. 85–106, esp. pp. 93–95.

³³ De Ente et Essentia, c. 2., ‘Ex his enim quae dicta sunt patet quod essentia est illud quod per diffinitionem rei significatur; diffinitio autem substantiarum naturalium non tantum formam continet sed etiam materiam, aliter enim diffinitiones naturales et mathematicae non differrent … Patet ergo quod essentia comprehendit et materiam et formam’.

³⁴ I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their very helpful suggestions and my parents for continuing to encourage me to seek the truth.