The Master of Metaphysics and the experience of wonder in Saint Thomas Aquinas

As a precondition, the job of teaching metaphysics requires knowledge of the roots of this science with respect to the experience of wonder, since, only through this experience, can we ascend to knowledge of its formal object, the being «ut habens esse», the being that possesses as an act the «esse». The enormous difficulty of this job lies in two factors. On the one hand, professors can only communicate objective structures. On the other hand, they must ensure that students do not fall into the error of reducing metaphysical speculation to the logical structure of reasoning, because, in this case, students would not have come to contemplate reality from the perspective proper to this knowledge, that of being, which implies an order of all the formal or objective elements to the «actus essendi». With this pedagogical concern, this article mainly investigates the transcendental nature of the experience of wonder and, correlatively, its constitutive reference to the «Ipsum esse subsistens».