IDEA ARCHETIPA. — This designation indicates the logical, supreme, and primordial form of all things. Philosophers and theologians discuss it in order to clarify the relationship that exists between the knowledge of God and the reality of the universe.
Two problems may be distinguished, concerning respectively the idea as such (logical form) and the idea as archetypal (from Gr. ἀρχή = “principle” and τύπος = “image”: primordial form).
1. idea (v.) is understood—among the term’s many other meanings—the form of a being, existing outside that being: «Per ideas intelliguntur formae aliarum rerum, praeter ipsas res existentes» (Sum. Theol., 1ª, q. 1, a. 1). Such a form may serve a twofold purpose, according to the twofold kind of our cognitions: in the practical order, to function as the exemplar of the thing whose form it is; in the gnoseological order, as the intelligible species of the cognitive act, that is, as a form obtained through abstraction, the principle and means of knowledge of things.
In God, the most pure act, the idea is not to be understood in the human manner, that is, as a representative, abstract form informing and determining the intellect to know, but only in the first sense, namely, as a most pure model, immutable in itself, but participable outside itself in a finite manner by innumerable empirical individuals.
The existence of such an idea, not as a separate form subsisting in itself in the Platonic manner, but in the divine mind (cf. s. Agostino, Quaest. 83, q. 46: PL 40, 29-31), is beyond doubt. Although it is not formulated in explicit terms in S. Scripture, this affirmation is nevertheless commonly accepted by the Fathers and theologians (Suárez, De Deo Uno, lib. III, cap. 5, n. 2); indeed, Toledo calls it «fere de fide» (In sum. Theol. s. Thomae Aquinatis enarratio, q. 15, a. 1, I, Rome 1869, p. 238), while Fr. Buonpensiere calls it «fidei dogma» (Commentaria in 1ʳᵉ Sum. Theol., there 1902, n. 975). In any case, it is required by the teaching of the Catholic faith, according to which the world depends on God through the nexus of a creative, provident, and providential causality. Since it is not the accidental result of occult or blind natural forces, but the effect of an intelligent and free cause, the entire universe must have had in the mind of its Artificer the corresponding exemplar, the idea (v. ESEMPLARISMO).
On this basis, the following doctrinal points are commonly admitted: in God there is not a single idea, but a plurality of ideas, uncreated, eternal, immutable, and invisible; the divine ideas are true exemplary forms, in imitation of which the divine Artificer acts in time; these ideas have a specific function both in the production of things and in God’s knowledge of them. Discussion instead concerns the following problems: of which determinate things exemplary forms are to be recognized in God: of real things (exemplaria), or also of possible things, indeed of futurible things, and not only with respect to the positive aspect of good, but also with respect to the negative aspect of evil (vationes); what kind of causality (efficient or extrinsic formal) properly belongs to the divine ideas; whether they belong primarily to the practical order and secondarily to the theoretical order, or vice versa; whether they influence the production of beings proximately or remotely; whether, in divine knowledge of created things, they are the subjective principle, that by which something is understood (id quo), or the objective term, that which is understood (id quod).
2. I. a. signifies the original type and primitive model of all the perfections that shine forth in the universe, “more in one part and less elsewhere”: the supreme exemplar, existing from all eternity in the divine mind.
It is certain that the i. a. is one and unique and that, at least as the remote and ultimate exemplar, it is the divine nature itself, known as infinitely participable and imitable; and that all the other ideas meet, indeed are identified, in it, so that it may truthfully be called the idea of ideas. It remains doubtful whether this i. a., or divine essence, should also be considered the typical, proximate exemplar in whose likeness all visible and invisible things are reproduced in time.
Nilo di San Brocardo