Thursday, September 21, 2006

Q44 A3: Whether the exemplar cause is anything besides God?

No. God Himself is the first exemplar of all things because things made by nature receive determinate forms (and this determination of forms must be reduced to the divine wisdom as its first principle, for divine wisdom devised the order of the universe, which order consists in the variety of things) and therefore we must say that in the divine wisdom are the types of all things, which types we have called ideas (i.e., exemplar forms existing in the divine mind [Q15, A1]), and these ideas, though multiplied by their relations to things, in reality are not apart from the divine essence (according as the likeness to that essence can be shared diversely by different things).

Moreover, in things created one may be called the exemplar of another by the reason of its likeness thereto, either in species, or by the analogy of some kind of imitation.

The exemplar is the same as the idea. But ideas, according to Augustine (QQ. 83, qu. 46), are "the master forms, which are contained in the divine intelligence." Therefore the exemplars of things are not outside God.