2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

THEOLOGY I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 39
as the divine Word and Wisdom, or ‘plan’,
by whom all things are made. This is how it
is possible to speak of us being ‘chosen in
him before the foundation of the world’
(Ephesians 1:4).
By the time of Thomas Aquinas, this
identification between Christ and the divine
ideas has become so obvious that he can say
‘whoever denies the existence of the ideas
is an infidel, because he denies the
existence of the Son’. These theological
developments seem to resolve some of the
classical problems about the ontological
status and location of the forms, but other
problems remain in new forms: Are there
as many ideas as there are things or more?
And if the latter, why are some realised
rather than others?
Despite these questions the theory of the
divine ideas remained central not just to
Christian philosophy but also to Christian
piety and spirituality well into the middle
ages. However, the rediscovery of Aristotle
in the thirteenth century, brought the
problems with the theory to the surface
once again. On the one hand there were
theological conservatives who understood
the Augustinian tradition in a hyper-realist
way, so that the ideas seem to become
quasi-autonomous substances again.
On the other, there were the Aristotelian
radicals who tended towards nominalism,
regarding forms as simply linguistic
constructs and denying any talk of ideas
in God as compromising the divine
simplicity.
Despite the efforts of Thomas Aquinas
and others to avoid these extremes, the
nominalist position had become dominant
by the latter middle ages and the theory of
the divine ideas had begun to fade from
theological consciousness. The most
significant consequence of this fading of
the divine ideas was a new stress upon the
divine will. If God does not create according
to the eternally existing pattern of his own
being, then the only answer to questions
such as why did God create this or that
must be simply that he wills it.
It seems that whereas early Christian
theologians had used the divine ideas to
argue for the freedom of creation,
according to the model of an artist, in the
later middle ages the rejection of the divine
ideas led to a more extreme voluntarist view
of this freedom in terms of the arbitrariness
of divine will. The subsequent rise of
voluntarism would have considerable
effects, not only upon the understanding of
God, but also on the modern view of human
freedom.
And yet this was not the end of the road
for the divine ideas. The question arose
again in the continental rationalist tradition
with the celebrated debate over grace
and freedom between the Cartesian
philosophers Malebranche and Arnaud in
the 1680s. By this point a more static,
mathematical view of the divine ideas had
made their relation to human ideas more
problematic. While Malebranche defended
a hyper-realist account of the divine ideas
but rejected innate human ideas, Leibniz
took up the discussion arguing in favour of
the divine ideas and innate human ideas,
against the empiricism of Locke. Closer to
home, the mature Coleridge, influenced
both by German idealism and the earlier
Cambridge Platonists, regarded Locke’s
rejection of the divine ideas as the death of
the ‘spiritual Platonic old England’.
Coleridge’s account of the divine ideas was
more thoroughly Trinitarian than Leibniz,
and also more poetic rather than
mathematical. For Coleridge the Christian
Platonism of the divine ideas enabled him
to move beyond the Hobbesian materialism
of Hartley and Priestly which he had
embraced during his Unitarian phase at
Jesus, while also supporting his realist
understanding of the creative powers of the
imagination. Coleridge’s philosophy was
itself significant in shaping the antiutilitarian
strand of British social criticism
in the nineteenth century which originally
led me into this project. The story of the
divine ideas is then a long and complex one,
which tells us as much about our
understanding of what it is to be human as
it may or may not do about God.