Abstract

The issue of divine exemplarism is one that Thomas Aquinas addresses from his earliest writings. Just as there are ideas in the mind of the human artisan, he argues, so too there must analogously be ideas in the mind of the divine artisan, ideas in God that act as exemplars or patterns for the things that he makes in their likeness. And Thomas presents these ideas as serving two significant roles: as epistemological principles and as productive or ontological ones. ;This dissertation assumes the existence of God in order to examine the metaphysical implications of divine exemplarism. Granting the theological significance of this doctrine, the dissertation argues that it is nonetheless at heart a philosophical one. According to Thomas, the divine ideas consist in God's knowing his essence as imitable in different ways by creatures. And in knowing these ideas, God knows those creatures. Thus, the divine ideas are epistemological principles. Insofar as God wills that creatures do imitate the divine essence according to the limitations of their respective exemplar ideas, creatures must resemble in some respect and participate in the infinite act of being . Thus, the divine ideas are also ontological principles and complement Aquinas's metaphysics of participation. ;As epistemological principles, the divine ideas account for God's having a proper knowledge of a multiplicity of created things. Without a doctrine of divine exemplarism, Thomas's metaphysics would reduce God to an Aristotelian "thought thinking itself" that thinks only itself: a first principle that is blissfully unaware of the world that it moves. As ontological principles, the divine ideas account for the determination of form and the directedness of nature. Without a doctrine of divine exemplarism, Thomas's metaphysics would either imply that the natural world acts according to chance rather than teleologically, or it would imply that God's creative act results from the necessity of his own nature rather than freely through his intellect and will. Neither of these possibilities, however, is consonant with Thomas's metaphysical thought as a whole. For these reasons, then, divine exemplarism is an essential element of Thomistic philosophy