A Comparative Study of the Place of God According to Ibnsina and Suarez with Regard to the Subject of Metaphysics

Abstract
One of the most important issues facing medieval philosophers and theologians, both Islamic and Christian, is the position of God in relation to the metaphysical subject raised by Aristotle. Aristotle considers the subject of metaphysics to be ‘being as being’, and most Greek philosophers believe that being as being is God. But Ibn Sina and Suarez provide a new interpretation of the subject of metaphysics and state that God can not be the subject of metaphysics, while at the same time, He is not separated from metaphysics. The main purpose of the present study is to compare the views of Suarez and Ibn Sina as two Christian and Islamic philosophers about the place of God in metaphysics. This research has been done by the analytical-library method.
These two scholars have similarities and differences in this regard in several respects. The most important difference between them is that Suarez, given the topic of the Three Chronicles of Christianity or the Trinty that ruled him, could not have the same meaning of ‘being as being’ in his mind as Ibn Sina. Aristotle, on the one hand, believed that the validity of a science is to have a single subject buton the other hand, he introduced 3 or 4 subjects for metaphysicscausing confusion among philosophers and commentators after him. One of the issues that seriously added to the confusion of philosophers was the God's place in the subject of metaphysics.
In general, different opinions and interpretations in this field can be expressed in two general perspectives:
1) For the Greek commentators of Aristotle, the subject of metaphysics is the special kind of being that is supersensible and immobile. For instance, Alexander Aphrodite, the first Greek commentator on Aristotle, considered metaphysics as a genus of which theology and divine sciences are of its types.
2) In the Middle Ages, according to the book of Exodus, the first Christian philosophers tried to equate the ‘being as being’ with the existence of the Bible.
With Ibn Sina and Suarez’s entry into medieval Christian philosophy, the medieval metaphysical philosophers realized that the being expressed in the subject of the metaphysics could not be merely a specific being such as God. Rather, this being is generally the same as the absolute being, which includes tangible and intangible beings, and this is separate from the first being.
Ibn Sina’s view is contrary to the view of Aphrodite and the Greek tradition which sought to prove that Aristotle's three definitions are different aspects of one thing and they have no inherent difference with each other. So, Ibn Sina at the beginning of his book Elahiyate Shefa says that “the subject of metaphysics is neither God nor the final four causes of things, but its subject is ‘being as being’ and God and the four causes are metaphysical issues”.
Suarez also presents new ideas that set himself apart from Aristotle and the other medieval predecessors by presenting and explaining the real existence as the subject of metaphysics. In order to determine existence as a real existence, he provides a set of pairs of concepts such as the formal concept versus the mental concept, as well as the nominal existence versus the descriptive existence. Suarez distinguishes between the formal concept as a mental actuality and the concept in the mind as an act that is directly perceived by the mind, and here he approaches Ibn Sina.