Quaestio Disputata : Divine Virtues and Divine Ideas of Virtues

1Readers of Theological Studies stand in Benjamin DeSpain’s debt for this original and richly suggestive contribution to Aquinas interpretation. Although he criticizes some of the claims I make in a prior publication in this journal, I, too, am indebted to his presentation, for several reasons. Not only has he paid me the compliment of noticing and taking seriously that article; he has gone to the trouble of reading and citing all my ponderous essays on the divine ideas, has engaged our disagreements politely and without rancor, and has, on the whole, not mischaracterized my assertions. In short, he has well maintained the standard of academic dispute, and I hope I will not fail to do likewise in trying to answer him.

I do have two small demurrals to make before entering into the dispute proper. First, DeSpain notes (p. 454) that I do not “simply bemoan, as many have, the presence of the divine ideas in Thomas’s thought,” but provide an alternate reading. The wording gives me pause. That “many” have been unhappy with ideas in Aquinas is indifferent to me, unless they begin from a similar analysis of the theological problem presented by that tradition. Moreover, I do not “bemoan” the presence of the ideas in Aquinas, since I am convinced by his arguments that they are quite necessary for a theological account of God’s creative knowledge. Nor do I resent at all their Platonic provenance as such, but only those aspects of their original form and function that clash, it seems to me, with Aquinas’s doctrine of creation. I believe Aquinas was aware of this clash, and altered the divine idea tradition to serve his own ends. This has not, I think, always been adequately noticed by theologians and Aquinas interpreters. That is what I have tried to call attention to.

Put very briefly, what I argued over four different articles is something like the following. In an initial treatment I proposed that Aquinas’s theory of divine ideas is more voluntarist and creation-focused than many accounts suggest, and less about an infinite set of defined cognitive objects in the eternal divine awareness. Then, in a set of three further articles, I attempted to lay out three broad theological implications of Aquinas’s “voluntarist” or “creationist” reconfiguration of the divine idea tradition; each of these implications represents a denial of a venerable Platonic and Christian-Platonic strand of the idea tradition, and also points forward to later (post-Aquinas) confusions that arise from failing to notice Aquinas’s alternative to that tradition. The three critical implications are, first, that human beings cannot know the divine ideas as such, and that they perform no distinct function in human cognition; second, that the divine ideas are not to be construed as the primal ground of finitude or difference, either in God or in the created realm; and third, that human beings cannot meaningfully approach or attain the divine ideas, and that they have no essential soteriological role.

This leads to my second hesitation. DeSpain rightly notes the larger scope and intent of my treatment of the ideas over various publications, but in his contribution he focuses on the third implication (that I treated in Theological Studies). He argues that Aquinas supposes a role for the divine ideas in his account of human virtue, and thus that Aquinas actually affirms the very notion of our approach to or convergence with them that I deny. This provides the substance of our dispute. But what I wish to question here is the way he justifies his focus on my one article dealing with this issue by claiming that it represents “the culmination of [DeHart’s] project,” and that by taking it on he is in some sense challenging or undermining the “trajectory” of my entire approach (pp. 454–55). I take this to mean that he believes the success of his critique of my position on this one issue implicitly calls in question the complex arguments I develop in the other articles. To which I reply, first, that the issue he has chosen to address specifically is not, to my mind, the culmination of or key to my position on the ideas. Indeed, I noted in the article in question (p. 414) that because Aquinas’s thinking was least developed on this point, most of my discussion would not really be concerned with direct interpretation of him. In light of this, second, I do not think I can accept DeSpain’s apparent appraisal of his own critique. Its focus on the issue of “convergence” with the ideas is helpful and sets up certain issues nicely, but in no way does it dispose of the case made in my other articles.

With these caveats, I will turn in the next three sections to substantive responses I wish to make to DeSpain’s reading of Aquinas and his critical application of it to my own position. In a final section I will indicate two disagreements between us over more general issues of Aquinas interpretation.

2. With regard to the readings of specific passages in Aquinas, I would want to register questions or disagreements with DeSpain mainly on three points, one from each of the three main sections of his paper. The first section is DeSpain’s initial discussion of the fascinating passage (ST 1–2, q. 61, a. 5) where Aquinas cites Macrobius’s fourfold division of the (cardinal) virtues. The focus is on the latter’s category of the “exemplar virtues,” and on the way that Aquinas specifically understands these “virtues” in God as the preexistent pattern of the human virtues, just as the “types” (rationes) of all created things can be said to preexist in God. For DeSpain, this deceptively innocuous comparison is in fact the crucial clue that, when properly interpreted, uncovers a fairly massive “extension” of divine idea theory “into the realm of ethics and anthropology” (p. 455).

I have little disagreement with most of what DeSpain says in this section in explicating both the Macrobius reference and the reference to the “types.” Where I begin to wonder, however, is when he suggests that the latter reference is of extraordinary significance for Aquinas’s theological anthropology, and that it should call the reader’s attention to a widespread chain of inferences and cross-connections with other parts of the Summa that end up situating virtue theory within the context of a metaphysical approximation to the divine ideas. In the following two sections I will indicate some of my questions about these putative connections; here I want only to express my hesitation around the supposed importance for Aquinas of Macrobius in general, and his notion of “exemplar virtues” in particular. Can the elaborate speculative scheme envisioned here be leveraged upon this single reference?

DeSpain himself seems to be aware of this potential credibility problem, and he attempts to head off such concerns by arguing that “the attention to [Macrobius’s] Comentarii throughout [Aquinas’s] works suggests that the Summa’s appeal to the four types of virtue is much more than just a nod to tradition” (p. 457). He adduces both the spread of references to this book among Aquinas’s works, as well as the number of them (around 56 citations). But in view of DeSpain’s purposes this is not terribly persuasive.

First, the Macrobius commentary on the dream of Scipio was one of the more widely circulated and cited classical philosophical texts in the Middle Ages and was consulted on a variety of topics. An examination of Aquinas’s references to Macrobius reveals what we might have expected. The latter is quoted on various points, though most concern complex enumerations and subdivisions of the classical virtues, the sort of topic scholastics loved to discuss. As a well-known author, his basic positions are usually referenced only briefly, and are often found in the mouth of an objector; Aquinas typically handles them briskly, hardly ever commenting in detail or making them the premise for a central claim of his own. Given the enormous size of Aquinas’s corpus and this pattern of scanty development, 50 or 60 references comes to seem less impressive, especially in comparison with truly authoritative figures.

Second, a better measure for the importance of Aquinas’s appeal to the fourfold division would surely be the use he makes of that actual doctrine in his work, rather than the total undifferentiated mass of reference to Macrobius. Here the yield is sparse indeed: as far as I can see, in all Aquinas’s extant writings Macrobius’s division of the cardinal virtues is mentioned perhaps nine or ten times. More telling still, in half of these instances specific reference is lacking to the very category of the “exemplar virtues” that forms the heart of DeSpain’s argument. Aquinas draws attention to this category once in one of his inaugural lectures as a teaching master, three times in his Sentences commentary (both very early works), and once in the Summa Theologiae (in the passage under discussion here). None of this suggests that the appearance of Macrobius’s “exemplar virtues” within an Aquinas passage will likely signal a major thematic development.

3. The burden of proof will therefore lie all the more heavily upon the material issue: the actual interpretation of the passage itself. The crux of DeSpain’s argument is that Aquinas’s comparison of the exemplar ideas to the preexistent “types” in God’s mind, fleeting though it may be, intentionally “locates within the doctrine of the divine ideas a way to think about the archetypal patterns for humanity’s actions” (p. 459). In the second main section of his paper he makes his main argument that the account of the divine ideas (ST 1, q. 15) provides the “deeper meaning” of Aquinas’s appropriation of Macrobius’s exemplar virtues, that is it signals the presence of the ideas at the heart of Aquinas’s “vision of virtue.” But this rests upon an identification of the exemplar virtues with divine ideas, and there are reasons to question this identification.

DeSpain makes two sorts of arguments in trying to show how the appeal to the ideas deepens the significance of the exemplar virtues. First, he correctly notes that human virtues are supervenient accidents, and that there are divine ideas of supervenient accidents. But this in no way means, as DeSpain too quickly concludes, that Macrobius’s exemplar virtues just are the divine ideas of human virtues. He is indeed correct that, in the God who governs the universe, there preexist the “patterns of all things to be done (rationes omnium agendorum).” But, as will be seen, these patterns are not the exemplar virtues.

DeSpain’s second argument builds on that problematic identification. He is correct, again, in specifying that God’s divine ideas of creatures are God’s knowledge of his own essence as imitable or participable by different creaturely kinds and individuals. Now, the exemplar virtues are the eternal actuality within God of the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, fortitude, justice) exemplified by human beings. Based on his assumption that the exemplar virtues are divine ideas, what more natural than for DeSpain to conclude that the human virtues are “particular imitations of God’s knowledge of himself as imitable,” and that they “are only actualized insofar as they participate God’s knowledge of the diverse ways humanity’s ordered action . . . imitate the divine mind”? Thus the virtues can now be seen as participations of the eternally preexistent “patterns of all things to be done.” But again this way of arguing depends upon the equation of the exemplar virtues with the divine ideas.

Why do I think it problematic to assume they are ideas? And if they are not ideas, what could they be? An idea, according to Aquinas, is a formal object of God’s knowledge that corresponds to some aspect of the created order, whether substance or (non-essential) accident or relation of order (order of finality or efficiency). When God knows what God creates, the idea of it is said to be present within the eternal knowledge. This immediately raises a serious problem for the divine simplicity, which Aquinas solves by a double identification: really, in terms of its being, all ideas are nothing else than the one divine essence; intentionally, in terms of their cognitive content, they are nothing else than the respective aspect of creation as known (by God). Aquinas describes this as a distinction between the many forms which are understood (the ideas) and the one form by which God understands, that is which actualizes the divine understanding (the one divine essence itself). This is not an incidental point of terminology. It is utterly crucial, for only by this distinction can the difference of creator from creation be secured, along with the necessary priority and transcendence of the creator. But it can lead to an ambiguity.

Take the term “exemplar.” It is a basic principle for Aquinas, as it must be for any proponent of creation ex nihilo, that whatever in the created order is actual and good (these two really amount to the same thing) is present in a prior and higher way in the being of the creator. So anything created, substance or accident or relation, “preexists” in God. Following an analogy of human artistic production, this presence of the creature within the divine cognition is like the “model” according to which God actualizes it in creation; hence God’s mind is the exemplar of creation. But here our earlier question arises in a new form: God is one, but creatures are many, so is God the one exemplar, or does God “contain” many exemplars? Aquinas’s answer is that God, in knowing the reality of the one divine essence, also knows in that one act all of the ways in which it can be deficiently imitated by created realities; one could even say that God knows the creature by “comparing” it to the divine essence, so to speak, knowing it as a particular manner of partially reflecting (hence also partially falling short of) the divine essence.

Aquinas’s varied use of “exemplar” language is an excellent example of how this distinction operates; in answer to the question whether the divine exemplar is one or is many, the answer can only be: both. On the one hand, Aquinas specifies (ST 1, q. 15, a. 3) that “exemplar” is the proper name for an idea insofar as it belongs to God’s practical knowledge, insofar as God knows the act of creating it. Since there are many creatures, there are many exemplars. On the other hand, Aquinas can use exemplar in a different way. All created things, in their diverse manners, imitate the one divine essence. Hence “God is the first exemplary cause of all things” or “God Himself is the first exemplar” (ST 1, q. 44, a. 3). Again, as above, these are two sides of the same coin: God’s wisdom contains all the exemplars because he is the one exemplar. But the fact that there are two sides to the coin is not to be ignored.

Hence, in reading Aquinas care should be taken to remember, in a given context, which of the relevant aspects of the divine knowing we are dealing with: the one or the many. And this is why I think the exemplar virtues are not ideas. They cannot be ideas in Aquinas’s sense because what they represent cannot be created. What God envisions in an idea, what he knows, is his own essence precisely as imitable by a created reality; and what God envisions of the creature, is exactly what God’s omnipotence creates. But the exemplar virtues as described by Aquinas clearly do not denote anything that could be created. In fact, Aquinas gives an account of them that identifies them with God, and God cannot be created; they are, in other words, aspects of the one divine essence. Look again at our key text ST 1–2, q. 61, a. 5. The exemplar virtue of prudence turns out to be the divine intellect (mens) itself, which is identical with God himself or his essence (ST 1, q. 14, a. 4). The virtue of temperance in God is God’s own self-consideration, which indicates the total identity of knower and known in God’s act of self-understanding, the “supreme return” of himself to his own essence (ST 1, q. 14, a. 2). Fortitude in God is nothing but the divine immutability, which follows directly (ST 1, q. 9, a. 1) from God’s simplicity; God is pure act, utterly without potency and composition, and thus identical with his own essence (ST 1, q. 3, a. 3). The fourth exemplar virtue, justice, might seem to present a problem as it involves a relation to creatures, so how could it be a way of denoting God himself? The problem is only apparent, as the discussion at ST 1, q. 21, a. 1 helps us to see. God’s act of creation is an expression of essential justice, because (ad 2) he “follows” the law of his own wisdom: his justice is conformity with himself. In accord with this “law” God renders to all creatures what is proper to them, but this is not the fundamental expression of God’s justice, because (ad 3) God’s “debt” to the creature is ultimately reducible to what God owes to himself. Hence it cannot be a surprise when Aquinas concludes (ad 4) that God’s justice is identical with God’s essence as a principle of action.

In short, the exemplar virtues should be taken as ways of speaking about the divine essence, rather than as divine ideas. They fall on the side of the one, rather than the many. The plurality of the virtues might seem to mitigate against this reading, but the entire point of the previous discussion has been to show that each of the four “different” virtues is really reducible to a way of speaking about God’s essence or God himself. This apparent multiplicity is always the case with divine attributes, according to Aquinas: the different conceptions we have of various divine excellences are due to the inevitable refraction of the unimaginable simplicity of God within our finite minds. They are our plural ways of grasping what in God is actually one.

So if multiplicity in itself is not enough, what decides, in a given case of ambiguity (as with the term “exemplar”), whether Aquinas is referring to the one divine wisdom or essence, or rather to the multiple archetypes of creatures, that is the ideas (which are that essence as multiply imitable)? The criterion lies in the answer to this question: Is the formal or cognitive content of the exemplar a particular creature or aspect of creation, actually or potentially (i.e. created or creatable)? If the answer is yes, we are dealing with an idea. But if the content is the divine being or essence as such, which can in no way be a creature, then an “idea” in the proper sense is not in view. I take this to be the case with the exemplar virtues. To be sure, this schematic is a bit tidier than Aquinas’s sometimes loose language might suggest. But I propose it as a sound rule of thumb that follows strictly from his other teachings about the act of creation and God’s knowledge of creatures.

4. There is an important corollary to my interpretation. The exemplar virtues are not ideas, but there must indeed be ideas of the human virtues, since these are known and created by God. But the content of this divine knowledge, that is what God’s ideas are “of” in this case, will not be denoted by the exemplar virtues (which are instantiated exclusively in God because they are God and hence uncreatable), but rather by the human virtues as described, for example, by Macrobius’s other three categories of the cardinal virtues (political, cleansing, and virtues of the cleansed). This indicates the third and final substantive point at which I take issue with DeSpain, centering on the account given in his third main section.

DeSpain is entirely correct in emphasizing throughout this section that the perfection God envisions for human beings involves more than their initial constitution as substances with their proper (essential) accidental qualities. Rather, God brings all creatures, including human beings, into a universal movement and progression, via providence, that is intended to direct human beings to the attainment of good habits or virtues. The latter are contingent accidents, whether acquired or infused, that mark the true excellence of the human being and his or her deeper participation in likeness to God. Much that DeSpain affirms in this section is well said and has my full agreement, but I cannot accept the way he makes his considerations into a supposed refutation of my “de-idealization” of the divine ideas. DeSpain argues in this section that because the exemplar virtues are divine ideas, this gives the lie to my claim that there can be no “convergence between a creature and God’s idea of the creature.” If the foregoing arguments I have made are acceptable, they would already disable this conclusion of DeSpain, for I do not concede that the exemplar virtues are ideas. But there is another confusion that comes to light in this section that needs to be addressed: DeSpain wrongly equates the exemplar ideas with God’s “eternal law.”

Let’s look at his argument in more detail. He begins (p. 463) by noting the two different kinds of creaturely perfection already mentioned: the “initial” completeness of a creature fully equipped with the organs and powers of its kind, and the “evolved” or “dynamic” perfection that is attained when the creature reaches the ultimate end or goal of its kind, either in its operations or by means of them. No problem there. But DeSpain then wrongly says that my denial of “convergence” between creature and idea is due to my restricting attention only to the first kind of perfection. For him it is the other, “dynamic” perfection involved in acquiring the human virtues that demands a “convergence” with or approximation to the exemplar virtue in God, just the sort of convergence I have said cannot happen. I think this is a mistake. Let me put my counterproposal succinctly. We can (and hopefully) do indeed approximate the exemplar virtues in God, but they are not ideas. And the actual ideas of our virtues are contained in the eternal law of God, but we cannot approximate them. There are two issues here: first, the false (as it seems to me) equation of exemplar virtue and eternal law, second the impossibility (unacknowledged by DeSpain) of approximating the eternal law.

First, what is the eternal law? Working on the analogy of the difference between intelligently producing things versus intelligently commanding subjects, Aquinas (ST 1–2, q. 93, a. 1) contrasts the preexistence in God of things to be produced (exemplars or ideas) and the preexistent plan or order of relations and interactions between those things. So just as the ideas are eternal “types” (rationes) of created things and qualities, eternal law is the single “type” (ratio) of the way these things are governed in their interrelation over time. Already in the discussion of the ideas (ST 1, q. 15, a. 2) Aquinas had foreshadowed this distinction, at the same time hinting (I suspect) at a certain primacy of total order over specific components: “[God] must have the idea of the order of the universe . . . [and] there cannot be an idea of any whole unless particular ideas are had of those parts of which the whole is made.” Broadly speaking, providence involves two sides: the immediate ordering by the creator of all things to one another (the network of relevant, natural or contingent, possible or fulfilled connections that specifies and individuates each), and the actual execution of those relations, which involves created mediation via the distributed causal interactions between different things, species and levels of reality (ST 1, q. 22, a. 3). In either case God foreknows the created realities in question. Although Aquinas’s terminology is not always consistent, in this passage he specifies that the eternal “type” of order is called providence specifically, while the “type” of the execution of the relations, the “type” of governance, is eternal law.

Based on the discussion above, it is immediately clear that eternal law is an idea, that is, God’s effective, eternal knowledge of some feature of the created order. But it is not clear to me from DeSpain’s discussion why he identifies eternal law with the exemplar virtues. He is surely correct (p. 463) that eternal law as defined by Aquinas must involve the “dynamic” perfection of all creatures including human beings, that is their acquisition or operational exercise of good habits. But the human perfections or virtues envisioned by God within his eternal law must once again be precisely human virtues, since it is these virtues that are actualized by the divine governance according to that law. The one passage of Aquinas DeSpain cites in direct support of an identity between exemplar virtues and divine ideas (p. 463, fn. 32) as far as I can tell says nothing of the kind; it simply reiterates the point that the eternal law contains the archetype in God of “the motions and acts of everything.”

The closest DeSpain comes to spelling out his reasoning comes in his appeal (pp. 463–64) to the correct notion that human virtue or excellence of whatever sort involves a closer approximation in likeness to God. His chain of inference seems to work this way. God eternally precontains the ideas of human virtues and virtuous acts in the form of eternal law. Virtues and virtuous acts involve a higher approach to the divine likeness, which must mean to the divine virtue (i.e. the exemplar virtues). Therefore, the eternal law must coincide with the exemplar virtues. Both premises are correct, but the conclusion does not follow, because divine virtue is not the divine idea of human virtue. In fact, the very wording he quotes from ST 1–2, q. 91, a. 2 suggests a different reading. One person differs from another in their degree of virtue, and hence in their closeness to the divine pattern; but such differences are “regulated and measured” by the “impression” given to each person’s acts by the eternal law. In other words, the exemplar virtues might well be a way of speaking of God’s essence as the ideal of all human excellence; but the eternal law has a different function: it determines how one’s acts and operations succeed, how far one gets in attaining that ideal.

To put it another way, and with this we have already begun to deal with the second issue, in approximating to the exemplar virtues we are not approximating to eternal law, for the simple reason that neither we nor any creature can deviate in the slightest from that law, that is from the total providential plan that ordains the order of relations and acts that actually obtains within creation. This is just the force of the words of Aquinas quoted on p. 462: “God has a governing plan extending to the minutest details about each single being.” Exactly so. The governing plan of omnipotence, also called providence, cannot fail to be enacted in the world. This is the point Aquinas makes shortly after the passage cited by DeSpain (ST 1, q. 103, a. 8): “[E]very agent, whether natural or free, attains its divinely appointed end, as though of its own accord,” that is by way of the “impression from the first mover.”

The dynamic goal of human existence is to approach as nearly as possible to the likeness of the divine virtue. But this likeness, precisely as created likeness, is not the divine virtue, but the human reflection of it. And the eternal law is what ultimately determines the proximity to that goal attained in any given case. The exemplar virtues we can indeed approach or “converge” with; this very convergence is suggested by the different categories of cleansing virtues versus virtues of the cleansed. But the exemplar virtues are not the ideas. There are, of course, eternal ideas of the human virtues; all that is created must preexist in the divine wisdom. But these ideas cannot be ideals of what might be achieved; they are God’s eternal all-creative knowledge of what is actually the case.

So where does this leave the reading of the key passage (ST 1–2, q. 61, a. 5)? Aquinas uses a quote from Augustine to state a general truth that makes sense of Macrobius’s “exemplar virtue” category: the exemplar of human virtue must preexist in God, just as everything created must preexist in God. By this lapidary comparison Aquinas leaves unresolved, if he even notices it, the ambiguity (explored above) lurking within the term “exemplar.” This is not a problem. He does not need to resolve it in the context of this argument, for he has accomplished his intention. He has made sense of Macrobius’s usage of “exemplar virtues” (an inherited terminology, not central to Aquinas’s own usage), and thereby harmonized his own theological discussion with an auctoritas. He can put Macrobius’s notion to good (if limited) use, and thereby “save” a venerable categorization of the cardinal virtues. No systematic development is needed; once he has made his point, he can move on.

This seems to me a more plausible picture of what is going on in this passage than the one DeSpain presents. His case for the unsuspected high importance of the category of “exemplar virtues” rests, it seems to me, on too many questionable identifications and, especially, on too elaborate a pattern of indirect or submerged implication. Ultimately DeSpain could still say much of what he wants to say about Aquinas in this paper, including his valuable insights concerning the dynamic of human virtuous perfection as involving progressive participation in the divine being, without venturing onto the terrain of the divine ideas at all. But were he to do this, he would also have to abandon or rethink his critique of my position. As it stands, his argument strikes me at one and the same time as too simple (assuming that exemplar always means idea), and too complex (invoking a Thomist metaphysics of virtue from an elusive pattern of “subtle gestures”).

5. Having raised the substantive questions that seemed necessary in light of DeSpain’s specific critique of my “non-convergence” account of the divine ideas, I can be brief on two broader hermeneutic issues he has raised. The first concerns the notion shared by many readers that Aquinas quite regularly adopts terminology, enumerations, and categorizations, and even broad claims not because they are specific or necessary implications of his own fundamental positions, but rather because they are well-established nuggets of wisdom hallowed by antiquity or association with venerated authority. That something of the sort is going on in his quotation from Macrobius seems pretty likely to me, as I have indicated above. DeSpain is rightly wary that too easy an appeal to this kind of assumption might well lead readers to miss what is going on in a given passage of Aquinas. I agree; but I also believe that Aquinas does in fact employ such “nods to tradition,” and not infrequently. DeSpain’s warning is well taken, and suggests that one must examine the context on a case-by-case basis, as I have tried to do here.

But he does not leave it at that. He suggests (p. 465) that this common hermeneutical assumption is tantamount to the “notion that Thomas willingly compromised his own theological and pedagogical agenda out of deference to the status quo,” and that its employment would warrant the “dismiss[al of] a dimension of his thought as a hollow gesture.” This is a dramatic mischaracterization of the issue. Even at his most innovative Aquinas always seeks maximal agreement between his claims and classical traditional formulations. He does this with utter sincerity, confident that ultimately the truth bequeathed by the church’s tradition is one, and that he can and must appropriate its language for his insights. Is this a culpable “deference to the status quo”? The brilliant dialectical skill at his disposal allows him to find the most convincing points of connection between his positions and those (sometimes quite different, even divergent) of his revered predecessors. Does this mean he has “compromised” his agenda? This work of loving retrieval is oftentimes in play when a traditional topos is under discussion, and should be noted by the interpreter. Does this reduce Aquinas’s remarks in such a context to a “hollow gesture”? I see no warrant for attaching these extreme conclusions to Aquinas’s appropriation of tradition. Indeed, they seem to depend upon assumptions about creativity, authority, and authorial intent that are quite modern, and far removed from the scholastic mind.

The other interpretive concern raised by DeSpain concerns my use of the adjective “anti-Platonic” in regard to an aspect of Aquinas’s thought. In footnote 27 on p. 461 he sharply takes issue with this choice of words. Now I had explained with some care what I did and did not mean by the phrase “anti-Platonic,” and readers are invited to peruse the passages helpfully noted by DeSpain in my relevant articles. But the latter is still alarmed that my usage implies that any and every possible version of divine idea theory that might claim Platonic or Neoplatonic inspiration is ruled out of court. Although I remain unaware of any such theory that avoids the theological problems I identify in my articles, and DeSpain does not specify any (except, perhaps, that of Aquinas himself, though that is precisely the point in dispute), I am happy to grant the possibility. But given the fact that my usage was explicitly directed at those elements of the Platonic tradition that had the biggest influence on Christian accounts of the divine ideas, and these are precisely the elements which present the theological difficulty, I do not see why my usage should be “particularly problematic.” DeSpain’s reaction has confirmed what I knew from experience: the phrase is “provocative.” It remains an open question for me why it should be so.

DeSpain goes on to suggest that Aquinas’s own appropriation of the idea tradition should really itself be considered a variation of that tradition’s Platonism, rather than its rejection. But entering such disputes quickly leads, I think, into unfruitful territory. After all, any theory at all that affirms divine ideas, including that of Aquinas, could ipso facto be labeled in some sense “Platonic.” But my point was never to dispute that the broad notion itself (the archetypal preexistence of creatures within the creator’s mind) is Platonic in origin. The point was rather that Aquinas, operating under the imperatives of a theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo that was quite foreign to the Platonic philosophy in virtually all its forms, so radically and ingeniously reworked the divine idea framework that it amounted to a rejection of crucial assumptions and functions that were definitive within that philosophy. If anyone wishes to insist that Aquinas’s doctrine is still “Platonist” in some sense, there is little to be gained by disputing it, but it does make me wonder what is at stake for the interpreter of Aquinas in salvaging the epithet. The passages from Aquinas’s John commentary that DeSpain cites in this regard (p. 461, fn. 27) do not really resolve my puzzlement, since they still presume the radical alterations to the Platonic theory that I have identified. As for the larger question of whether Aquinas as a whole is basically “Platonic” or “Aristotelian” or whatever, the question lacks interest because it devolves into a dispute over how to define these adjectives. That is why I took pains to isolate exactly what the “Platonic” elements were that Aquinas was abandoning in his development of idea theory. Nor need one assume that “anti-Platonic” captures Aquinas’s own understanding of his motive or procedure in that development. My central concern was never what Aquinas himself did or did not consider “Platonic,” but rather how Christian theology today could throw the brightest light upon his innovations and grasp their implications. With this in mind, I am still not sure I understand the urgency behind DeSpain’s rejection of my terminology. As for our more substantive dispute concerning the divine ideas, readers will decide for themselves.