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Document Details : Title: The Eclipse of the Divine Mind Subtitle: Aquinas, Creation, and Eternal Ideas as Anti-Platonic Epistemology Author(s): DEHART, Paul Jeffry Journal: Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses Volume: 93 Issue: 1 Date: 2017 Pages: 1-27 DOI: 10.2143/ETL.93.1.3203589 Abstract : In Platonic epistemology the human intellect grasps the truths of sense objects by discerning the timeless unified archetypes that they participate in: the ideas (later understood as thoughts in the divine mind). This scheme was adopted in much Christian theology from the patristic period onward, but in the thirteenth century the new challenge arose of accounting for God’s precise knowledge of creatures without allowing any real multiplicity in God’s mind or challenge to his ontological priority as creator ex nihilo. Thomas Aquinas faced this new challenge by developing a doctrine of divine ideas that implicitly denied three claims associated with Christian Platonism: that the ideas enable human cognition through illumination; that they provide a divine guarantee for truths judged necessary by the human mind; and that the intra-divine locus of the ideas is the eternally generated Son or Word. These implications of Aquinas’s position on ideas will be made explicit through comparison with the claims of Bonaventure, Henry of Ghent, Duns Scotus, Francis Suarez, and Jean-Luc Marion. |
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