"... For [the medievals] the verb to be was essentially an active verb signifying the very act of existing; to affirm their own actual existence was much more to them than to affirm their present existence, it was an affirmation of the actuality, that is to say the very energy, by which their being existed. If, then, we should arrive at an exact understanding of the medieval conception of causality we must ascend to this very act of existence, for it is clear that if being is act, the causal act must necessarily be rooted in very being of the cause."
— Etienne Gilson, Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, ch.5: "Analogy, Causality, and Finality"
How different is this understanding of being than the modern! informed as it is by physical science, which must necessarily take the existence of its objects for granted.
We apprehend a little more of that final blaze with which the 'Divine Comedy' ends:
L'amor che muove il sole e l'altre stelle.
The Love which moves the sun and the other stars.— Divina Commedia - Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, line 145
Postscript
I hope it is obvious that I do not mean to disparage physical science itself. In its proper sphere (taking such things as existence and causality for granted) it is one of those things that really are "essentially" human — i.e., that it is an obvious, appropriate, and entirely necessary thing to do.
What I take aim at is a casual transplant of scientific methods from the physical into the metaphysical — a move which results in something entirely inadequate. Because science originally takes certain things for granted, it cannot then explore or even explain these things; this is the reason why science cannot give us a metaphysic.
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