Monday, September 25, 2006

Q45 A4: Whether to be created belongs to composite and subsisting things?

Yes. Properly speaking, created things are subsisting beings because, as accidents and forms and non-subsisting things are to be said to co-exist rather than to exist, so they ought to be called rather "concreated" than "created" things.

To be made and to be created properly belong to whatever being belongs; which, indeed, belongs properly to subsisting things, whether they are simple things, as in the case of separate substances, or composite, as in the case of material substances. For being belongs to that which has being--that is, to what subsists in its own being.

In the proposition "the first of created things is being," the word "being" does not refer to the subject of creation, but to the proper concept of the object of creation. For a created thing is called created because it is a being, not because it is "this" being, since creation is the emanation of all being from the Universal Being.