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27 Aquinas on Measure The notion of measure in Aquinas seems to be omnipresent. One has only to consult a Thomistic database to realize the pervasiveness of this concept throughout Aquinas’s works; despite this fact, however, relatively few studies of it have appeared in Neoscholastic metaphysics.1 A discussion of measure is of central importance in Aquinas’s metaphysics of infinite and finite being, in the relationship of creatures to God, and in the ordering of all things to their end. The movement of the procession of creatures from God and their reversion to him both involve measure.2 The measure theme is thus closely associated with the Neoplatonic doctrine of circulatio, according to which every efchapter 2 1. James M. McEvoy, “The Divine as the Measure of Being in Platonic and Scholastic Thought,” in Studies in Medieval Philosophy, ed. John Wippel (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 85–116. See also by McEvoy, “Biblical and Platonic Measure in John Scottus Eriugena,” in Eriugena: East and West, Papers of the Society for the Promotion of Eriugenian Studies, Chicago and Notre Dame, October 18–20, 1991, ed. Bernard McGinn and Willemien Otten, Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies 5 (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994): 153–77. 2. For a Neoplatonic discussion of the measure theme, which concentrates on God as the measure of finite beings, as well as the procession of creatures from God and their return to him, Proclus’s Elements of Theology is an excellent source (e.g., props. 39 and 117). Proclus’s views reappear in both the work of Pseudo-Dionysius and in the Liber de Causis. See Theological Elements in “The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus,” trans. Thomas Taylor (London: T. Payne & Son, 1792). 28  Beauty, Order, and Teleology 28  Truth, Measure, and Virtue fect turns back by nature to the cause from which it originates, for in its likeness to the source lies the perfection of the effect.3 While at the metaphysical level Aquinas is perhaps especially indebted to Pseudo-Dionysius and to the Book of Causes for his development of the measure theme,4 in questions of epistemology Aquinas relies heavily on Aristotle. Because of the epistemological relevance of this theme to his metaphysics, in particular to the relationship of creation to the divine intellect, I will first draw attention to Aristotle’s importance in Aquinas’s thought on measure, and then will proceed to consider the pivotal role given to the measure theme in Thomistic metaphysics. My interest in what measures beings will also extend to what measures them in activity and thus measures the way of their returning to their source. The return of creatures to their origin , their longing for perfection, is made possible by their continual approach, their approximation, to the measure. In his commentary of Aristotle’s remarks on knowledge as the measure of things and as measured by things, Aquinas admits that knowledge is somewhat like measuring, since measure is defined as a principle of knowing, that which makes known the quantity or intensity of a thing. However, Aquinas maintains that it is truer to say that the mind is dependent on the object of knowledge and is thus measured by it, for a thing is measured by that on which it depends.5 When we know some3 . See Jan A. Aertsen, “The Circulation-Motive and Man in the Thought of Thomas Aquinas,” in L’Homme et son univers au moyen âge (Louvain-la-neuve: Proceedings of the 7th International Congress of Medieval Philosophy, 1986), 1: 432–39. See also M.-D. Chenu, Introduction à l’étude de S. Thomas d’Aquin (Paris: Vrin, 1954), 266ff. 4. Cf. Aquinas’s Commentary on the Book of Causes, trans. Vincent A. Guagliardo, Charles R. Hess, and Richard C. Taylor (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 107: “Since the first being gives being and infinity to intelligences , it is the measure of first beings, namely, of intelligent things, and consequently of second beings, namely, of sensible things, inasmuch as the first in each genus is the measure of that genus insofar as, by approaching it or receding from it, something is known to be more perfect or less perfect in that genus.” Chapters 4 and 5 of Pseudo-Dionysius’s Divine Names also deal with the measure theme: God or the Good is for Pseudo-Dionysius the measure of all creatures, but himself is unmeasured. 5. See In...

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