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In Scholasticism philosophy, is the absolute perfection of God.
Charles Albert Dubray, as accepted by Charles George Herbermann, stated that in created beings,
According to Thomas Aquinas, a thing which requires completion by another is said to be in potency to that other: realization of potency is called actuality. The universe is conceived of as a series of things arranged in an ascending order, or potency and act at once crowned and created by God, who alone is pure act. God is changeless because change means passage from potency to act, and so he is without beginning and end, since these demand change. Matter and substantial form are necessary to the understanding of change, for change requires the union of that which becomes and that which it becomes. Matter is the first, and form the second. All physical things are composed of matter and form. The difference between a thing as form or character and the actual existence of it is denoted by the terms essence and being (or existence). It is only in God that there is no distinction between the two. Both pairs – matter and form, essence and being – are special cases of potency and act. They are also modes: modes do not add anything to the idea of being, but are ways of making explicit what is implicit in it.
The common being is the object of metaphysics, which studies being as being in the universal manner.
According to Fr Battista Mondin, the common being is also analogical, like the intensive Being. Otherwise, if the common being were to be preached unambiguously, all entities would be reduced to a single entity.Mondin, Ontologia e metafisica, ESD, 2022, p. 130 God cannot coincide with the common being because it would be reduced to a mere abstraction existing in the human mind alone. Summa contra Gentiles, I, 26; Summa Theologiae, I, q. 4, a. 1, ob. 3 and ad 3. Quoted in Mondin, Ontologia e Metafisica, ESD, 2022, p. 93
While the common being is immanence like all the entities which it is abstracted from, instead the intensive Being, who is God Himself, is transcendent. Both of them are trascendental in respect of the nine Aristotelian categories.Mondin, Ontologia e metafisica, ESD, 2022, po'. 108, 150
An univocal common being is the object of the philosophies of Parmenides and Plato,Mondin, Ontologia e metafisica, ESD, 2022, p. 108 as well as of Duns Scotus, Suárez, and Wolff.Mondin, Ontology and Metaphysics, ESD, 2022, p. 88 An immanent Being is the object of the philosophies of Plotinus, Hegel and Heidegger.
The most perfect Being (or Esse ipsum subsistens, Being that subsists by itself and not in virtue of other-from-itself), is as strong and powerful, intelligent and free, noble and precious, profound and intimate to creatures, as nobody else can exist.
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