Quaestio Disputata: Divine Virtues and Divine Ideas of Virtues

Abstract

Benjamin DeSpain has taken issue with my claim that the divine ideas according to Aquinas’s conception cannot be the objects of our moral striving, nor can they be approximated by us. I argue that he has not attended to a necessary distinction between the divine essence as single exemplar and the ideas as multiple exemplars of the varied imitability of that essence. The result is that Macrobius’s “exemplar virtues” are the divine essence; they are not divine ideas, nor are they eternal law. Approximation to these virtues is possible, but not to the ideas. I conclude with some reflections on Aquinas’s use of tradition, and on the question of his “Platonism.”