Quaestio Disputata: Aquinas’s Virtuous Vision of the Divine Ideas

Abstract

Paul DeHart has recently proposed that Thomas Aquinas did not elaborate on the ethical and anthropological implications of his position on the divine ideas. The author challenges DeHart’s interpretive assumption by demonstrating that Thomas consciously and deliberately extended the divine ideas into his vision of virtue through a network of subtle allusions to the doctrine in the Summa Theologiae. Specifically, the article considers the place of the divine ideas in Thomas’s appeal to Macrobius’s categorical division of the cardinal virtues into political, purifying, purified-in-mind, and exemplar. It further examines the relation of this gradation of virtue to Thomas’s thought on the ontological correlation between each person’s creational formation and the eschatological perfection of virtue.