The World as God’s Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas by Sebastian Morello has two goals. The first is to argue against reading Thomas Aquinas as a mere Christian Aristotelian by reconstructing “the philosophical role of Neoplatonism in the Thomistic synthesis, with a view of situating the notion of participation at the heart of Aquinas’s metaphysics” (23). The second goal aims at setting forth a theocentric aesthetic to conceive and perceive the world as an icon of God. Of the book’s four chapters, the first three are dedicated to the first goal, and the last chapter to the second goal.
In chapter 1, Morello begins his presentation of Aquinas’ Neoplatonism by outlining the differences between Aristotle’s and Aquinas’ respective doctrines of act and potency. This, in turn, reveals Aquinas’ “Neoplatonism . . . articulated in Aristotelian terminology” (19) because Aristotle “rejects any notion of metaphysical participation in perfect transcendental forms” (19), and applies act and potency merely to the change of motion of individual substances. Therefore, argues Morello, Aquinas’ application of the Aristotelian terms act and potency, within a participation metaphysics, is un-Aristotelian, since Aquinas posits “forms subsisting wither perfectly and separately (as in the Platonic worldview), or in the mind of God (Aquinas’s view)” (28). Morello proceeds with the demonstration of these claims by expounding both Aristotle and Aquinas, with the aid of philosopher William Norris Clarke.
Chapter 2 can be divided into two parts. The first part (37-51) is an exposition of Aquinas’ participationist solution to the problem of the one and the many within a single being: “The general meaning of participation in Aquinas is . . . rendering intelligible the relationship of the many to the one, i.e., explaining the common possession, in many subjects, of a given attribute by reference to a transcendent source, whose perfection they receive in part . . . that which is finite possesses according to its own finitude that which is of itself infinite” (25). The second part of the chapter is an attempt to present a unified account of the differing views of Aquinas’ participation metaphysics as interpreted by Cornelio Fabro, Louis-Bertrand Geiger, and John Francis Wippel.
The third chapter can also be divided into two parts. In the first part, Morello places Aquinas’ doctrine of the divine ideas as exemplar causes within the presentation of creation as an icon of God’s attributes. That the world is an icon of God means that it is the self-communication of God. Rational and moral creatures can grasp this, and, in fact, it is primarily to them, as rational and moral creatures, that this divine communication is directed. In turn, by contemplating this icon, and contemplating it, we might come to know something of God (80).
For Aquinas, divine ideas serve as exemplar causes, meaning that both the essences of created beings and all potential accidental attributes resemble these ideas. However, Morello does not make clear why the “sharing of a likeness does not . . . entail that such essences and accidents participate directly in their respective divine exemplars” (78). This claim is made because “inasmuch as finite beings analogously possess the divine attributes . . . finite beings participate in a likeness of the exemplar that is the divine nature itself” (78). But this likeness seems unnecessary if we consider that Aquinas himself defines participation as the partial reception of attributes from another source (44). Therefore, the stipulation of this “likeness” seems unnecessary to preserve the Creator-creature distinction because the very nature of participation preserves that, and it would thus make more sense to get rid of this tertium quid and to conceive creation itself as a likeness of God.
In the second part of the third chapter, Morello shows that Aquinas’ “five ways” are much more than an exercise in natural theology, but are also an integral part of Aquinas’ participation metaphysics, which “offer a path to God open to all who philosophically distance themselves from the world in order to contemplate and reflect upon it” (91). According to Morello, the final chapter and the conclusion constitute the most original part of the book (8). He attempts to set forth what he sees as the common intuition of a deep connection between the aesthetic experience and the religious experience, according to which beauty is a transcendental attribute, and, as such, a divine attribute. Morello contends that all art is essentially religious—sacred art, pious art, and profane art (116). This is because, through the applied form, the “artist adds onto finite being a human intentionality in ordering the mind of the subject to his work toward the same ascent which he himself has undertaken” (120); thus, the artist through his art imitates God since the artist both creates and communicates to other intelligences (120).
This is also true for “bad art,” which is as religious as bad religion is religious (120); even bad art derives its meaning from namely God through its privation of the transcendental attributes, such as harmony and order (121). For Morello, this transcendental assumption in humanity’s aesthetic experience points at mankind’s alienation from the true, the good, and the beautiful, exiled from unity into disunity, which can find ultimate solution in the triune God of Christianity and in the incarnation (126-128).
This book is too advanced for beginners and too basic for those familiar with Aquinas’ aesthetic. The non-theist reader could feel somewhat left out. Though some implicit apologetics is attempted in the last chapter, Morello’s arguments will hardly convince readers whose starting points are not those of classical theism since it is not entirely clear from the book why Morello’s Thomistic Neoplatonism can account better than its competitors for the aesthetic experience. That said, Morello has written a short presentation of Aquinas’ Christian Neoplatonist view of reality and beauty, something which is not easy to communicate with this level of accessibility. The World as God’s Icon is a good introduction to encourage further study.
Marco Barone is an independent scholar.
Marco Barone
Date Of Review:
January 10, 2025
