Exemplarism

EXEMPLARISM. - Philosophical doctrine that attributes to an ideal world, existing in itself or in the divine mind, the function of exemplary causality, sometimes also efficient and formal, with regard to the corporeal world and human knowledge. There is therefore a twofold exemplarism, metaphysical and gnoseological; the latter, however, in the respective systems, is always conceived in connection with and dependence on the metaphysical one.

Exemplarism 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 but imitations (μύμησις) and participations (μέτρησις). Platonic exemplarism influences the Philonic conception of the λόγος as instrument of creation and exemplary cause of the world; and it lives again in a new form in the system of Plotinus, in which the ideas generated within the νῦν, actuating as objective term the knowledge of the soul, are also the exemplary cause of corporeal things that derive from the soul. Exemplarism receives 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 exemplarism, taken up again by St. Bonaventure, is preserved in St. Thomas as far as concerns the affirmation of the eternal ideas in the divine mind and their function of exemplary causality of all things; on the other hand, the efficient causality of the creative act St. Thomas traces back rather to God as subsistent being, 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 holds it in a sense that accords with the Aristotelian theory of abstraction (cf. Sum. Theol., 1°, q. 84, a. 5), but that does not seem to render Augustine's thought sufficiently.

Ugo Viglino