A Symposium: In What Does Being Subsist?

Dylan Thomas:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

Johan Von Staupitz:

Not by chance, therefore, but by His bidding did He fashion the universe. With His wisdom He adorned and made attractive each and every thing so that each was very good but not, however, the best. It is impossible for the creature to be the best, since to be a creature means to tend toward nothingness, and to return to nothingness unless upheld by the One Who created him. (Eternal Predestination and its Execution in Time, in Forerunners of the Reformation, ed. Heiko Oberman. Philadelphia: Fortress: 1981, 175).

St. Anselm:

Since it cannot but be that those things which have been created live through another, and that by which they have been created lives through itself, necessarily, just as nothing has been created except through the creative, present Being, so nothing lives except through its preserving presence. (Monologium, XIII).

René Descartes:

It is certain (and this is an opinion commonly accepted among theologians) that the action by which God preserves the world is precisely the same as that by which he created it; so that, even if, in the beginning, he had never given it any other form at all but that of a chaos, provided he established the laws of nature to function just as it does ordinarily, one can believe, without doing injustice to the miracle of creation, that by this means alone all the things that are purely material could over time have been rendered such as we now see them. (Discourse on Method, Part Five).

Jonathan Edwards:

It is said, that when that due time, or appointed time comes, “their foot shall slide.” Then they shall be left to fall as they are inclined by their own weight. god won’t hold them up in these slippery places any longer, but will let them go; and then, at that very instant, they shall fall into destruction; as he that stands in such slippery declining ground on the edge of a pit that he can’t stand alone, when he is let go he immediately falls and is lost…. Sin is the ruin and misery of the soul; it is destructive in its nature; and if God should leave it without restraint, there would need nothing else to make the soul perfectly miserable. (“Sinners In the Hands of an Angry God”).

G.K. Chesterton:

I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explaation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. (Orthodoxy, ch. IV).

Gilles Deleuze:

There has only ever been one ontological proposition: Being is univocal. There has only ever been one ontology, that of Duns Scotus, which gave being a single voice….From parmenides to Heidegger it is the same voice which is taken up, in an echo which itself forms the whole deployment of the univocal. A single voice raises the clamor of being. (Difference and Repetition, 35. Quoted in J.K. Smith, Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 207).

James K. Smith:

Emphasizing the integrity of creation guards against an ontology that views the structures of creation as somehow incomplete or deficient, which in turn reflects a deficiency in the Creator. So just as with the critique of the occasionalists, it is to glorify the Creator that Leibniz glorifies the structures of nature/creation as characterized by a completeness that indicates a relative self-sufficiency.(Introducing Radical Orthodoxy, 217-218).