Conor Stark

In this paper, I compare Dionysius’s and Aquinas’s strategies of solving the problem of the One and the Many. That is, I examine how they reconcile the simplicity of the Divine Essence with the multiplicity of the Divine Ideas. I claim that they posit a perfect conceptual overlap between the ‘contents’ of certain Exemplar Ideas and the creatures fashioned in their likeness. My argument proceeds in two steps. First, I analyze the analogous significations of the Divine Names and how these senses facilitate Dionysius’s and Thomas’s metaphysical reductions of created esse to Ipsum Esse. Second, I develop the implications of these accounts of exemplar causality by contrasting them with a form of Platonism. Such Platonism reifies the Divine Names, turning them into separate hypostases and exemplar causes, which creatures only imperfectly participate. For Thomas and Dionysius, by contrast, creatures perfectly resemble God’s Ideas. Given this perfect resemblance, I conclude that, in some sense, one can know the ‘contents’ of God’s creative intentions simply by coming to know creatures. However, I conclude by adding several, important caveats to our knowledge of the Divine Exemplars.

“‘The greatest difficulty,’ Parmenides said, ‘is the following.’”{1} So begins Plato’s most challenging critique of exemplarism in Parmenides. The elderly philosopher asks Socrates how knowledge of the Ideas is possible if individuals only partly resemble them. For Socrates is a man rather than the fullness of ‘what it is to be man’. The latter signifies or ‘holds back’ more perfections than those captured by this or that man.

1.Plato, Opera: Volume II: Parmenides, Philebus, Symposium, Phaedrus, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, Amatores, ed. J. Burnet, 2nd edition (Oxonii: Clarendon Press, 1922) 133b–c.