ESEMPLARISMO. – Philosophical doctrine that attributes to an ideal world, existing in itself or in the divine mind, the function of exemplary causality, and at times also of efficient and formal causality, with regard to the corporeal world and human knowledge. There is therefore a twofold e.: metaphysical and epistemological; the latter, however, is always conceived, in the respective systems, in connection with and dependence upon the former.
E. is the essence of the Platonic system, in which the ideas, separate (according to Aristotle’s interpretation), constitute the pure and immutable reality of which sensible things are nothing more than imitations (μύμησις) and participations (μέτρησις). Platonic e. influenced the Philonian conception of the λόγος as the instrument of creation and the exemplary cause of the world; and it lived on in a new form in the system of Plotinus, in which the ideas generated within the νῦν, by actualizing knowledge of the soul as their objective term, are also the exemplary cause of corporeal things that derive from the soul. E. received its highest Christian interpretation in St. Augustine, for whom the ideas, existing in the divine mind and therefore identified with subsistent truth, are at once the eternal light in which God contemplates all things, the exemplary and efficient principle of every creature, and also, in a sense not definitively specified by Augustine, the light by which the human soul rises to the intelligible knowledge of eternal truths. Augustinian e., taken up again by St. Bonaventure, is preserved in St. Thomas insofar as it concerns the affirmation of eternal ideas in the divine mind and of their function as the exemplary causality of all things; instead, St. Thomas attributes the efficient causality of the creative act rather to God insofar as he is subsistent being, the universal cause of being (cf. Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 45, a. 5). As for knowledge in rationibus aeternis affirmed by St. Augustine, the Angelic Doctor understands it in a sense that accords with the Aristotelian theory of abstraction (cf. Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 84, a. 5), but which does not seem to convey Augustine’s thought sufficiently.