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The World As God's Icon: Creator and Creation in the Platonic Thought of Thomas Aquinas
The World as God’s Icon is a scholarly but accessible enquiry into the sources of Aquinas’s thought, and the reception of his realism in the work of the “Existential Thomists” as they uncovered Aquinas’s Neoplatonic themes. In this short but compelling work, the key aspects of Aquinas’s Platonism are brought together to convey a broad ontology, which ultimately presents creation as an icon of God. This is accomplished on three fronts. First, the received notion that Aquinas ought to be understood as a pure—albeit Christian—Aristotelian is challenged, by arguing rather that he was an heir to a much richer synthesis of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy, which he brought to perfection in his own thought. Second, it is made startlingly clear that it is in fact Neoplatonic ontology that provides the framework for Aquinas’s thought insofar as it reveals the world as an icon of God, allowing for a new way of looking in wonder at creation, while providing a certain “praeambula fidei.” Third, we are offered a way of thinking about aesthetics that follows from the metaphysical view advanced.
While this book is oriented most directly to those familiar with Thomistic approaches to metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics, and especially to those seeking a truly humane application of Aquinas’s thought, beyond the circle of such readers its message will be of keen interest to anyone pursuing a deeper understanding of the Catholic philosophical tradition.
While this book is oriented most directly to those familiar with Thomistic approaches to metaphysics, the philosophy of religion, and aesthetics, and especially to those seeking a truly humane application of Aquinas’s thought, beyond the circle of such readers its message will be of keen interest to anyone pursuing a deeper understanding of the Catholic philosophical tradition.
- GenresPhilosophy
154 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 19, 2020
I should start by saying I'm deeply sympathetic to -- and in substantial agreement with -- Morello's main point: that the Neoplatonic dimensions of Aquinas's metaphysics can help us see the created order as an icon of God.
But "The World As God's Icon" suffers from several deficiencies and confusions that significantly mar its ability to successfully argue or convey that point.
The main ideas behind Morello's interpretation of Aquinas were already firmly established decades ago, in no small part due to the scholarship within Existential Thomism. Aquinas did not merely synthesize Aristotle with Christianity, but synthesized Aristotelian ideas (about act-potency, science, etc) with a wide range of other ideas (Platonic, Neoplatonic, Augustinian, Avicennan, etc) -- but is this news? Popular misconceptions aside, does this -- the main thesis of Morello's book -- even need to be demonstrated anymore? In our day, are there serious Thomist or medieval scholars who are unaware of this?
When Morello does argue this point, he does so mostly by paraphrasing Thomistic scholars like Clarke, Wippel, and Doolan. The issue here is not that Morello agrees with many of their interpretations of Aquinas on topics like esse and exemplary causes; it's that it is obvious Morello is simply summarizing large portions of "Explorations in Metaphysics" and "The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas," reproducing Clarke's or Wippel's line of thought (or references), rather than articulating his own line of thought based on having fully internalized either Aquinas's works or the secondary literature.
When Morello is not merely paraphrasing Clarke or Wippel, his forays into interpreting Aquinas often raise eyebrows. To give one example, he seems to have confused Aquinas's view that God knows singulars (e.g. Socrates) with the notion that God has an "idea of Socrates". That is not really correct, as Aquinas argues God knows singulars through the perfections contained in his essence (and thus in his self-knowledge). To give another, he confuses Aquinas's view that our likeness to God is the way creatures participate in the divine essence (including the divine Ideas, which are for Aquinas really identical to that essence) with the notion that creatures participate *in a likeness* of the divine essence. (What this has to do with avoiding pantheism, as Morello maintains, is beyond me.)
One particularly puzzling and problematic section of Morello's book is the fourth and final chapter on theological aesthetics. I'll highlight two problems. The first is that Morello's thesis in Chapter 4 has little to do with the intricate details of the specifically Thomistic metaphysics spelled out in Chapters 1-3. Whereas the first few chapters go to great lengths to parse Aquinas's specific reception of the act-potency distinction as a way of understanding the limitation of the actus essendi by essence, as well as the relation of both esse and essentia to the divine Ideas -- the last chapter (after an unnecessary and unpersuasively argued tangent about Gothic architecture and Renaissance Thomism) hardly brings anything distinctively Thomistic into his views on aesthetics, comparing them instead with what can only be described as a vaguely Neoplatonic worldview. The dots simply don't connect.
The second problem with Chapter 4 is that, because Morello's book is not primarily about aesthetics, he can't but gloss over all the really interesting questions about the relationships between creation and artistry, artistic form and divine exemplars, etc. Thus, not only is the reader left wondering what aesthetics has to do with, say, Chapter 2's plunge into the nitty gritty of "participation by composition" vs "participation by similitude" -- they're left without a particularly clear or articulated view on aesthetics at all.
The overall result is essentially a piece of writing with the quality of an average Master's thesis: 1) a lot of promising and interesting nuggets, albeit summarized with significantly less coherence and clarity than found in the original sources of those ideas, combined with 2) a far too ambitious thesis attempting to tie together lots of disparate ideas without being able to make the arguments sufficient to support them, and 3) ugly and nearly illegible prose.
I have to pause for a moment to say more about this last complaint: 3a) Morello, bewilderingly, frequently drops "in" from the phrase "participate in," leaving us sentences throughout like "Socrates participates man"; and 3b) Morello often drifts into the awkward pseudo-academic-ese born of frequent visits to Thesaurus.com during the writing process. The worst offender may be his use of "surmise" as a noun (as in "I will support this surmise with evidence").
If Morello had simply wanted to articulate his intuition about theological aesthetics, and had wanted to look to Aquinas as an example of how to ground this in profound metaphysical insights, perhaps a First Things article might have been appropriate. But as a piece of academic writing, I struggle to see the meaningful contribution "The World As God's Icon" makes either to our understanding of Aquinas or to aesthetics.
My actual rating would be 2.5 stars, but I can't bring myself to round up to a full 3.
But "The World As God's Icon" suffers from several deficiencies and confusions that significantly mar its ability to successfully argue or convey that point.
The main ideas behind Morello's interpretation of Aquinas were already firmly established decades ago, in no small part due to the scholarship within Existential Thomism. Aquinas did not merely synthesize Aristotle with Christianity, but synthesized Aristotelian ideas (about act-potency, science, etc) with a wide range of other ideas (Platonic, Neoplatonic, Augustinian, Avicennan, etc) -- but is this news? Popular misconceptions aside, does this -- the main thesis of Morello's book -- even need to be demonstrated anymore? In our day, are there serious Thomist or medieval scholars who are unaware of this?
When Morello does argue this point, he does so mostly by paraphrasing Thomistic scholars like Clarke, Wippel, and Doolan. The issue here is not that Morello agrees with many of their interpretations of Aquinas on topics like esse and exemplary causes; it's that it is obvious Morello is simply summarizing large portions of "Explorations in Metaphysics" and "The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas," reproducing Clarke's or Wippel's line of thought (or references), rather than articulating his own line of thought based on having fully internalized either Aquinas's works or the secondary literature.
When Morello is not merely paraphrasing Clarke or Wippel, his forays into interpreting Aquinas often raise eyebrows. To give one example, he seems to have confused Aquinas's view that God knows singulars (e.g. Socrates) with the notion that God has an "idea of Socrates". That is not really correct, as Aquinas argues God knows singulars through the perfections contained in his essence (and thus in his self-knowledge). To give another, he confuses Aquinas's view that our likeness to God is the way creatures participate in the divine essence (including the divine Ideas, which are for Aquinas really identical to that essence) with the notion that creatures participate *in a likeness* of the divine essence. (What this has to do with avoiding pantheism, as Morello maintains, is beyond me.)
One particularly puzzling and problematic section of Morello's book is the fourth and final chapter on theological aesthetics. I'll highlight two problems. The first is that Morello's thesis in Chapter 4 has little to do with the intricate details of the specifically Thomistic metaphysics spelled out in Chapters 1-3. Whereas the first few chapters go to great lengths to parse Aquinas's specific reception of the act-potency distinction as a way of understanding the limitation of the actus essendi by essence, as well as the relation of both esse and essentia to the divine Ideas -- the last chapter (after an unnecessary and unpersuasively argued tangent about Gothic architecture and Renaissance Thomism) hardly brings anything distinctively Thomistic into his views on aesthetics, comparing them instead with what can only be described as a vaguely Neoplatonic worldview. The dots simply don't connect.
The second problem with Chapter 4 is that, because Morello's book is not primarily about aesthetics, he can't but gloss over all the really interesting questions about the relationships between creation and artistry, artistic form and divine exemplars, etc. Thus, not only is the reader left wondering what aesthetics has to do with, say, Chapter 2's plunge into the nitty gritty of "participation by composition" vs "participation by similitude" -- they're left without a particularly clear or articulated view on aesthetics at all.
The overall result is essentially a piece of writing with the quality of an average Master's thesis: 1) a lot of promising and interesting nuggets, albeit summarized with significantly less coherence and clarity than found in the original sources of those ideas, combined with 2) a far too ambitious thesis attempting to tie together lots of disparate ideas without being able to make the arguments sufficient to support them, and 3) ugly and nearly illegible prose.
I have to pause for a moment to say more about this last complaint: 3a) Morello, bewilderingly, frequently drops "in" from the phrase "participate in," leaving us sentences throughout like "Socrates participates man"; and 3b) Morello often drifts into the awkward pseudo-academic-ese born of frequent visits to Thesaurus.com during the writing process. The worst offender may be his use of "surmise" as a noun (as in "I will support this surmise with evidence").
If Morello had simply wanted to articulate his intuition about theological aesthetics, and had wanted to look to Aquinas as an example of how to ground this in profound metaphysical insights, perhaps a First Things article might have been appropriate. But as a piece of academic writing, I struggle to see the meaningful contribution "The World As God's Icon" makes either to our understanding of Aquinas or to aesthetics.
My actual rating would be 2.5 stars, but I can't bring myself to round up to a full 3.
March 14, 2024
For me it was worth getting the book just for the first chapter. Morello shows that Aquinas not only makes use of Aristotle but also of Plato.
Here’s part of his aim: “I intend to argue in support of the recovery of the Neoplatonic component in the thought of Aquinas . . . . I will attempt to reconstruct the philosophical role of Neoplatonism in the Thomistic synthesis, with a view to situating the notion of participation at the heart of Aquinas’s metaphysics,” (23).
Here’s part of his aim: “I intend to argue in support of the recovery of the Neoplatonic component in the thought of Aquinas . . . . I will attempt to reconstruct the philosophical role of Neoplatonism in the Thomistic synthesis, with a view to situating the notion of participation at the heart of Aquinas’s metaphysics,” (23).
September 10, 2021
Wonderfully niche. One of those resources I really wish I had before I finished and defended my dissertation.
January 3, 2022
Great book. Very glad to have read it. I came for the intro and first three chapters (of four),
not engaging much with the fourth on participation and aesthetics.
Morello persuaded me that Aquinas was part of a continuous stream of Christian philosophy
that inherited much from Neo-Platonic thought, most clearly seen in his theory of participation.
Aquinas is usually thought to have baptized Aristotelianism and largely left Platonism to one side,
but this is not the case. He rather synthesized some key elements of both schools of thought,
preferring the terminology of Aristotle. The author seems to agree with Gregory Doolan (whose
book on the Divine Ideas I've reviewed here too)
on much of what the latter has to say about the Divine Ideas and participation metaphysics, but I
remain unpersuaded, and still a but under-informed, on that.
not engaging much with the fourth on participation and aesthetics.
Morello persuaded me that Aquinas was part of a continuous stream of Christian philosophy
that inherited much from Neo-Platonic thought, most clearly seen in his theory of participation.
Aquinas is usually thought to have baptized Aristotelianism and largely left Platonism to one side,
but this is not the case. He rather synthesized some key elements of both schools of thought,
preferring the terminology of Aristotle. The author seems to agree with Gregory Doolan (whose
book on the Divine Ideas I've reviewed here too)
on much of what the latter has to say about the Divine Ideas and participation metaphysics, but I
remain unpersuaded, and still a but under-informed, on that.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews