Aquinas on the Divine Ideas as Exemplar Causes

Conclusion

244 CoNCLUSIoN Thomas’s doctrine of the divine ideas touches upon some of the most fundamental elements of his metaphysical thought. In the course of exploring his doctrine, we examined such issues as the nature of causality, the real distinction between essence and existence, and the theory of participation, to name a few. As a result, we have a fuller picture of Thomas’s doctrine of divine ideas and can understand why exemplarism is indeed an essential element of his philosophy. Central to Thomas’s notion of exemplarism is the characteristic of similitude or likeness (similitudo ). As we saw in chapter 1, Thomas commonly describes an exemplar as “that in the likeness of which something is made.” Following this general notion of exemplarism, he identifies different types of exemplars. In one sense, the form of a natural agent is an exemplar since it causes an effect that shares the same species as itself. We identified this as a “natural exemplar” because what is made in its likeness is made according to nature, not to art. For Thomas, however, the form of a natural agent is an exemplar only in an improper sense because the natural agent does not itself determine its intended end, but rather nature does. Another sort of exemplar that Thomas identifies is the object or model toward which an artisan looks in making his work. Aquinas refers to this model as an “external exemplar ” since it exists externally to both the agent’s mind and his nature. Since the sort of exemplarism that it ex- ^ 245 ercises does involve the agent himself determining the end of his work, the artisan’s external model more truly deserves the name “exemplar” than does a natural agent’s form. Nevertheless, it still is not an exemplar according to the primary sense of the term because this external object is dependent for its exemplarism on the causality of a prior exemplar, namely, the artisan’s idea. It is this form in the mind of the artisan that Thomas considers to be an exemplar according to the primary sense of the term. Since an idea is an exemplar only inasmuch as something is made in its likeness, Thomas identifies exemplar ideas as belonging to the practical and not the speculative intellect. In its role as a productive principle, an exemplar idea acts as the measure of the thing made. Thus, the idea is a formal cause of the thing that it exemplifies even though it is not intrinsic to that thing. As we saw, Thomas considers the fundamental characteristic of form to be that it is a pattern by which something is the kind of thing that it is. For this reason, he concludes that form is not limited to an intrinsic mode of causality: it can be extrinsic as well. And this is what he considers an exemplar to be, namely, an extrinsic formal cause. Hence, he does not postulate a fifth type of cause but adheres to the fourfold Aristotelian division. In the course of considering ideas as exemplar causes, Thomas comes to define an idea as “a form that something imitates because of the intention of an agent who predetermines the end for himself.”1 Still, even though an exemplar idea is properly a formal cause of the thing it exemplifies, its causality involves more than just formality . Following Thomas’s mature use of the term “exemplar,” we found that he only considers actually practical ideas to be exemplars , for only they in fact exemplify something. Inasmuch as these ideas do exemplify something, their causality necessarily also entails efficient and final causality: it entails efficient causality beCoNCLUSIoN 1. De ver., q. 3, a. 1 (Leonine ed., vol. 22.1.100:220–23): “Haec ergo videtur esse ratio ideae, quod idea sit forma quam aliquid imitatur ex intentione agentis qui praedeterminat sibi finem.” 246 cause the exemplar’s causality is caused by the efficient cause, and it entails final causality because the exemplar, acting as an end, must first motivate the intention of the agent for him to produce his work. Nevertheless, we found that in its capacity as an exemplar cause, an idea’s causality is properly reduced to the order of formal causality since the characteristic that is proper to it as an exemplar is its imitability. Having discerned these general characteristics of exemplarism, we proceeded in chapter 2 to examine Thomas’s arguments for the...