1. Augustine and Aquinas on divine exemplars and the unity of the cosmos

‘For God, the Creator of all knows where and when each thing ought to be, or to have been created, because He sees the similarities and diversities which can contribute to the beauty of the whole. But He who cannot see the whole is offended by the deformity of the part, because he is blind to that which balances it, and to which it belongs. We know that men are born with more than four fingers on their hands or toes on their feet: this is a smaller matter; but far from us be the folly of supposing that the Creator mistook the number of a man’s fingers, though we cannot account for the difference. And so in cases where the divergence from the rule is greater. He whose works no man justly finds fault with, knows what He has done’.Footnote ⁴

Augustine frames deformity within a part-whole argument: God surveys the whole and knows where each thing belongs; we see only parts and misjudge. Anomalies, like polydactyly, depart from a local standard yet can serve the good of the whole. The point is as much epistemic as moral: limited vision misreads the part, whereas the Creator’s comprehensive view discloses a unity and goodness not undone by local irregularities. What appears ugly or out of place in isolation may enrich the overall pattern when seen together with everything else.

Augustine’s thinking draws heavily on Plotinus. His doctrine of the Divine ideas is framed self-consciously within the Neoplatonic view of Forms, participation, and graded likeness. Forms are in Intellect (Nous), not the first principle; the One, Intellect, Soul, and Nature stand in a productive hierarchy. Plotinus’ causality is imaging causality: the producer’s internal act remains itself, while its external act appears ‘in another’ as a likeness, hence the lower is dependent and inferior by reception, not by any loss in the source. Each level begets a lower by logos; the lower is an eikōn of the higher, dependent and resembling it, through an ‘external activity’ that leaves the source undiminished.Footnote ⁵

Plotinus assigns intelligible organising power to intelligible Forms (ideai) and rational structures (logoi). The crucial feature of Plotinus’ system lies in his doctrine of Intellect (Nous), the second hypostasis of an emanative hierarchy. In Intellect, the Forms are a hen-polla (‘one-many’).Footnote ⁶ They are many as intelligible contents, while World-Soul articulates them into logoi suited to production; the sensible order is thereby the image of the One. Plotinus uses the term logos spermatikos to stress that these latter principles are causally generative, while rejecting the Stoic claim that they are immanent.Footnote ⁷ Logoi spermatikoi are strictly intelligible powers that act upon matter. Thus, Socrates’ being snub-nosed and two-footed is the outcome of a personal set of logoi, derived from an idea in Intellect, that soul arranges in matter while itself remaining immaterial.

Augustine preserves the Plotinian insight while Christianising its ontology. The One is the Father; Intellect is the Verbum; and there is no World-Soul, since creation proceeds by God’s free decree. The Forms are rationes aeternae,Footnote ⁸ the simple Divine Wisdom, appropriated to the Word, the consubstantial likeness of the Father and exemplar of all creatures.Footnote ⁹ Hence, the paradigms are not hypostatised beneath God but are the Divine Wisdom itself. The Word is the Form or reason-principle, in whom and according to whom all things are made.Footnote ¹⁰ The result is that the paradigms are not hypostatised entities below God, but the Divine wisdom as such, one essence containing ‘all the invisible and unchangeable reasons of visible things’, so that ‘what it contains, it also is’, and the Son, as Wisdom, is the very ‘form’ in whose likeness all things are made.Footnote ¹¹ Augustine’s exegetical key is in principio Footnote ¹²: it names not a temporal starting point, but the ontological foundation of all things, the Verbum.Footnote ¹³

This account bears directly on cosmic unity. Augustine can speak of two ways the cosmos is unified. First, it is an ordo communis: the whole is a coordination of parts to a common good, historically unfolded as the rationes seminales Footnote ¹⁴ guide natures ‘from within’ towards their telē, thus specifying the order-to-end of mutable creation without compromising creatio ex nihilo or Divine transcendence.Footnote ¹⁵ Second, precisely because all ideas are exemplars in the Word and are refracted through created rationes, Augustine may also characterise the cosmos as an imaging whole: the temporal totality constitutes a single, layered image of the Divine wisdom. This is genuinely Platonic for it preserves graded likeness, different orders and species resembling their paradigms to different degrees, while identifying Forms with the simple Divine wisdom, preventing the hypostatic emanationism of Plotinus.Footnote ¹⁶ Imaging and participation are effected through logos; the Forms are a one‑many unity by their identity with the Divine essence and their distinction as rationes aeternae in the Word. The natural order, meanwhile, reflects, in its interconnected structures, the unity of the intelligibles. The cosmic pattern is exitus-reditus: procession by free decree and return by providential governance. All creatures bear the vestigia Trinitatis, measure, number, and weight, so that creation is a temporally extended mirror of God’s eternal being.Footnote ¹⁷ The result, as Theodore Kondoleon puts it,Footnote ¹⁸ is that for Augustine the entire created cosmos is the image of God.Footnote ¹⁹ If the uncreated ideas are identical with the one Divine Wisdom, and if creatures are made in the likeness of those ideas through created seminal reasons, then the whole, as the harmonised many of such likenesses, amounts to a single, ordered vestigium of the one Divine essence,Footnote ²⁰ not by composition in God but by multiform imitation in creatures.Footnote ²¹

Against this background, Aquinas functions as a foil because he combines (i) a doctrine of trinitarian vestiges, (ii) localisation of the imago Dei in the rational powers, and (iii) an Aristotelian account of forms that resists Augustine’s intrinsic imaging metaphysics. Aquinas rejects separate Forms in favour of immanent forms in hylomorphic substances: individualised universal principles of sameness, always existing joined with matter in a hylomorphic substance.Footnote ²² He affirms vestigiae of the Trinity in every creature as an effect bears the mark of its cause,Footnote ²³ and he locates the image of God in the human mind,Footnote ²⁴ so physical deformity does not diminish dignity.

The result is that for Aquinas, there is no such thing as a universal, qua universal, directly causing a particular. As Gregory T. Doolan argues, Aquinas does grant that God, like a human artisan, can make things as imitations of exemplar ideas in His intellect,Footnote ²⁵ but these Divine exemplars differ significantly from Platonic Forms. Thomistic Divine exemplars can only be ideas of individual substances, not pure universals.Footnote ²⁶ On this view, since only individuals exist, and since only those things that can exist are able to proceed from God’s will, it follows that God can only use as exemplars those ideas that can create individuals.Footnote ²⁷

Aquinas therefore retains Divine ideas and their measuring role, but he construes ‘exemplar’ strictly as an idea practically ordered by will to produce an effect; not all ideas are exemplars, only the actually productive ones.Footnote ²⁸ The exemplar is an extrinsic formal cause, a form ad quam, sharply distinguished from the agent’s intrinsic form (a quo) and the effect’s intrinsic form (secundum quam), so that the idea measures the effect according to the order of form without entering it as a constituent.Footnote ²⁹ Providence and exemplarism are related but distinct: the idea measures the species absolutely, whereas providence measures order to endFootnote ³⁰; the world’s unity is therefore an order executed by primary and secondary causes under a common rule, not a single intrinsic image of the Divine essence.Footnote ³¹ Even when Aquinas likens a Divine exemplar to a forma totius to explain its reach over the whole composite,Footnote ³² he insists on its extrinsicality, extending the rule to form and matter without making God a formal cause intra rem.Footnote ³³

Set against Augustine, Thomistic teleology uses Divine exemplars as extrinsic measures and dispenses with created rationes seminales. Species-level rules are external; intrinsic limitation and perfection lie in forms received and actualised in matter.Footnote ³⁴ Goodness is the actualisation of natural potency, act is perfection, and creatures are composites ordered to further actualisation.Footnote ³⁵ Natural inclination (appetitus naturalis) determines operations to proportionate ends and explains uniform regularities.Footnote ³⁶ Act is exclusive, since although one abstract capacity can be in potency to contraries, contrary determinations cannot simultaneously actualise the same potency.Footnote ³⁷ Aquinas resolves the appearance of co-present contraries by distributing them across distinct powers individuated by their proper objects, themselves set by the form.Footnote ³⁸ Thus, ‘touch’ comprises several specific senses with different contraries as objects (like hot-cold or wet-dry), so the skin can register heat and hardness at once, but not through a single sense-power.Footnote ³⁹ This inclination furnishes determinacy. An inclination is intelligible only relative to its end; the end is virtually present in the agent through the inclination, which is why final causality remains foundational. Hence, occur the regularities of nature, for since inclinations derive from fixed forms, natural agents act uniformly.Footnote ⁴⁰

Aquinas says, like Augustine, that every creature bears vestiges of the Trinity insofar as it reflects its triune Creator as an effect. Creatures display a trinitarian trace in their measure, species, and order, which can ground limited reasoning about God by way of causal dependence and appropriation. The deeper difference is that while a Thomistic vestige gives an inferential route from effects to a first cause, nevertheless, lacking strong Divine exemplarism, it does not disclose the inner trinitarian processions and relations in a way that could ground a Plotinian-style ascent from multiplicity to unity.Footnote ⁴¹

To summarise, Augustine’s cosmology aligns with Neoplatonism: all ideas in the Word, including pure universals, are exemplars. Ideas are first one in the simple Divine wisdom and are expressed as many in the Verbum, then mediated intrinsically into nature through rationes seminales that carry the triad of measure (mensura), number (numerus), and weight (pondus) and unfold kinds across timeFootnote ⁴²; participation is thus a graded hierarchy of likeness from the Word through these created reasons into particulars, so the cosmos is both an ordered whole and an imaged whole of the Divine essence.Footnote ⁴³ By contrast, for Aquinas, the exemplar that specifies the ratio formae is an extrinsic formal measure (ad quam) practically determined by God’s will, not a Platonic participatory model,Footnote ⁴⁴ so cosmic unity is an ordo communis under providence rather than a unified image of the Divine essence.Footnote ⁴⁵ As a result, goodness for Aquinas is the actualisation of natural potency, with form conferring power and a natural inclination that determines operations to proportionate ends, which explains uniform natural regularities and the primacy of final causality.

Consequently, while Aquinas can commend a physically deformed individual as located within order, he cannot obviously, on his extrinsic exemplarism, commend it as a stepping stone towards knowledge. Aquinas affirms creatures as vestiges, but he treats these more as causal signatures in effects than as formal participations in intelligible unity; they can support limited inference to a first cause, but they do not yield a Plotinian-style epistemic ascent in which cognition rises to ever greater unity. Augustine can do both, because the same individual, however impaired, still images the one Divine essence by a diminished yet real participation in the exemplar ideas refracted through creation.Footnote ⁴⁶

2. Approximative Aristotelian goodness

To open this section, I introduce a second, non-dynamic Aristotelian notion of goodness, what David Oderberg calls instantiation or approximation, which is entailed by Aristotelian ontology.Footnote ⁴⁷ Here, goodness does not lie in a thing’s self-movement to an end, but in how closely it matches an abstract pattern understood as a formal ratio. Since a thing is good when its natural powers are actualised, and the capacity to instantiate an abstractum is itself a natural power, such instantiation counts as goodness. Thus, a knot of wood may be good as an instance of triangularity insofar as its outline approaches the triangular idea, or a polished steel ball is praised for near-sphericity, though neither reaches the limit case. Crucially, approximation must trade on powers the substances themselves possess: wood can weather into straighter edges; steel can be ground rounder. Many scientific idealisations do not meet this test. For instance, treating a particle as a dimensionless point aids calculation but describes nothing the particle could become; the pattern exists only as a concept abstracted from real cases. Approximation applies only where degrees make sense (e.g., more or less spherical), not where intermediates are impossible (such as a dimensionless point). The evaluation here is descriptive: it posits no inner drive towards the pattern, and falling short is merely the absence of an additional merit, not a defect.

We can clarify Oderberg’s Aristotelian approximative goodness as follows:

A particular, x, is good as an Aristotelian approximation of universal type A when (i) x’s natural potencies make it an instance of A; (ii) A is not x’s substantial form; (iii) x’s traits heighten the salience of the accidents it has qua instance of A, so that x is an especially apt case for teaching or discerning what A is.

At first, this does not appear an improvement over the previous dynamic goodness for dealing with our problem. Oderberg describes a situation where a particular object approximates a universal object with various degrees of success or failure. The universal object is a single standard or measure, which the particular object succeeds or fails to approximate along a spectrum. Prima facie, cases of ambiguous or partial approximation turn out sub-optimal. If the standard of excellence is whether something is a good example of an abstractum, then an ambiguous or partial approximation can only be a bad example. For instance, a shape halfway between a circle and square is a sub-optimal example of both a circle and a square.

However, the picture changes once we see the specifically Thomistic principles which underly the approximation model of goodness. These are three: universal abstract objects as beings of reason (entia rationis), the convertibility of being and goodness, and the way that such convertibility affects abstract objects.

On Aquinas’s account, the abstract pattern a particular approximates is an intelligible species, an ens rationis grounded in real likenesses abstracted from extra-mental things.Footnote ⁴⁸ Belonging to the order of esse intentionale, the species subsists only as an intellectual act or content, arising by abstraction, negation, or related compositional operations, yet its formal content is the same as the form organising the extra-mental substance: the universal exists in intellectu, abstracted from a real common nature that exists in re only as individuated by matter.Footnote ⁴⁹ Degrees of approximation therefore mark how fully a singular manifests that common formal ratio under material conditions, not how far it participates in a separate Form. In this respect, Aquinas differs from Augustine, whereas Augustine treats universals as exemplars ante rem in the Verbum and posits rationes seminales as intrinsic mediations, Aquinas recognises no such intrinsic mediations, the Divine exemplar is extrinsic, and the immanent ground for approximation is the natura communis present in singulars and intentionally captured in the species.Footnote ⁵⁰

Within esse intentionale, some entia rationis (e.g., privations) serve only logical predication, whereas intelligible species are instrumental: they enable the intellect to know the thing itself, not a mere image. On Aquinas’s internal-similarity realism, many individuals possess numerically distinct yet specifically the same nature; the sameness at issue is given by the notae included in a kind’s ratio: thus, humans and horses each instantiate the common set of animal-notes (nutrition, growth, sensation, local motion), even though humanity and equinity are numerically distinct. This common similarity in re explains why a single intelligible species, existing in intellectu, can be the likeness of many and ground stable predication. The resulting intentional tie is remotely grounded in universal knowability, proximately in the nature present as object-being.Footnote ⁵¹

Given this intentional likeness of one common nature in many, Aquinas distinguishes first and second intentions of entia rationis.Footnote ⁵² From an individual (e.g., Socrates), the mind forms a first intention (the concept ‘Socrates’)Footnote ⁵³; then, by comparing concepts with their instances and with one another, it posits second intentions. Against this background, second intentions are those conceptual structures (like genus and species) that the mind forges when, having grasped several first intentions, it considers their formal content indeterminately and orders them for predication and inference. Their characteristic marks are being predicable of many and belonging to the intentional order: they are features of concepts as concepts.

Second intentions, of which genera are an example, derive their legitimacy from a fundamentum in re: where many individuals share one and the same formal content in kind, numerically multiplied in each. The intellect may frame a logical item that is predicable of many and that ranges over opposed specific determinations as alternative terminations of that shared content. The genus, for instance, is a second intention signifying some form indeterminately in all the species under it, by which it has a unified essence.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, because humans and horses really share animal powers, the genus animal reflects a common nature whose form in reality is compatible with either rational or non-rational completion. The genus’s logical features (like being predicable of many) express, at the level of thought, this real commonality and compatibility. This anchoring avoids Platonism, since no ante rem universal subsists apart from particulars (the containment pertains to the concept only), and it avoids nominalism or conceptualism, since what is contained conceptually answers to a genuine sameness of immanent form across individuals rather than to mere mental shorthand.

Finally, being and goodness are convertible for Aquinas. All being is good, yet according to the mode of its perfection.Footnote ⁵⁵ Entia intelligibilia, like first and second intentions, have a derivative goodness proportioned to their cognitive role. A categorical judgement is true by adaequatio intellectus et rei, the content intentionally present in the mind matches that in the particular or group of particulars,Footnote ⁵⁶ and because the species’ formal content is identical with that of extra-mental beings, we can, by compositio and divisio, predicate it of them. Entia rationis, like second intentions, are good insofar as they enable truth and gather many first intentions under one concept; an approximation is instrumentally good when a case discloses that second intention more clearly.Footnote ⁵⁷

Hence a Thomistic analysis of approximation divides its goodness into two. First, there is the goodness of the thing itself (ens reale) insofar as its features, proceeding from its own form and potencies, allow the intellect to abstract a likeness-bearing species; this is a relational goodness ordered to cognition, but it is anchored in the actualisation of the thing’s natural potencies, so presupposes its ontological goodness (convertibility of being, truth, and goodness).Footnote ⁵⁸ Secondly, there is the goodness of the intentional object (ens intelligibile), the intelligible species and the concept (first intention) together with second intentions (e.g., genus, universal). This is goodness of the intentional order, as successful cognitive instrumentality rather than as a natural form in things, insofar as these beings perfect the intellect by enabling adaequatio intellectus et rei and by ordering many first intentions under logical notes such as predictability.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus, a single case of approximation always carries a dual evaluation: (a) how well the particular exhibits the notae of the ratio so as to enable a stable abstraction; and (b) how well the resulting ratio and its second-intention structures work as rules for true predication and inference (instrumental goodness in intellectu).Footnote ⁶⁰

Aquinas often uses the term resolutio to mean abstraction as resolving a perceived substance into form and matter and resolving the universal from the particular by removing individuating conditions,Footnote ⁶¹ so that what is first confused in experience becomes distinct in intellection.Footnote ⁶² Aristotelian induction on this interpretation is the moment when epagōgē culminates in nous: the universal is grasped in the singular when its decisive notes are jointly and stably present to perception and thus available to intellect at once.Footnote ⁶³ Drawing on Jakob Ziguras, we can explain how the two sorts of goodness interact in approximation. This is not a mere summation of instances but a non-discursive seeing of the invariant within appearances, by isolating a ‘pure phenomenon’ whose stability across variations renders the universal legible.

The mechanism is straightforward. Where a specimen’s accidents conspicuously align with the notae of, say, ‘triangle’, the intellect abstracts a likeness with minimal comparison; it then reaches adaequatio intellectus et rei in fewer steps. The priority is the antecedent fit in rebus: a case is pedagogically useful because it is already a good example, a point that rejects counterfactual analyses and ties didactic utility to prior approximation to the ratio. Ziguras sharpens this by showing why some cases compress the route from sensible presentation to formed ratio. Disciplined variation and selection yield a presentation in which the defining features are sufficiently salient and stable for the universal to be seen rather than inferred.Footnote ⁶⁴

However, when we induce from several unambiguous cases, we can easily treat what usually accompanies a species as if it belonged to the species as such. For example, suppose that we have only ever encountered men, so wrongly conclude that, ‘all humans are bearded’. We then see a woman, and we realise beardedness is a non-essential accident of humans. By comparing two such unambiguous cases, one can indeed learn that beardedness is not essential to humans and clarify the essence of the species. Even comparison of clear cases can leave a coarse universal in place, because the mind still bundles merely typical accompaniments with what belongs per se.Footnote ⁶⁵

Here ambiguous cases can be uniquely clarifying, because they offer a minimal contrast locus that forces separation of per se from per accidens features. For example, Aristotle writes that ascidians inhabit the border between plants and animals. He says that, although they resemble plants by never moving, their ‘flesh-like substance’ indicates ‘some degree of sensibility’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Aristotle recognises ‘merely living animals’ whose life is confined largely to nutritive activity, and that sponges and ascidians occupy the threshold where touch is present only in the most rudimentary way, precisely the kind of case that distinguishes life from animal life. So, an ascent to a higher universal happens by a controlled breakdown of ordinary correlations.Footnote ⁶⁷ The borderline case of ascidians shows that growth and nutrition are not distinctive of animals, while simultaneously forcing Aristotle to identify what is distinctive of animals, sensation, anchored at the minimal level by touch.

Physical defects can serve the same epistemic function within a species. For example, Aristotle notes that some men, due to congenital deformity, are sterile from birth because the parts ‘useful for union’ are imperfect, so they do not grow a beard but remain like eunuchs.Footnote ⁶⁸ This is a case in which the individual is generated within humankind yet lacks a trait easily (but wrongly) treated as if it belonged to humanity as such. The result is a forced re-sorting of predicates: beard-growth cannot be a strict property of the human species and is at best a for-the-most-part outcome dependent on material and developmental conditions. Aristotle generalises this by his doctrine of generative movements, where the failure of more particular movements yields a fallback to what is more general, until what remains is what is common to the kind.Footnote ⁶⁹ The value here is that multiple features are held fixed, so the absent or ambiguous trait is isolated and shown to be non-essential, higher-level, or defeasible. In that way, physical deformity can function as a ‘pure phenomenon’ in Ziguras’ sense, and provide the resolution Aquinas associates with successful induction, by directing attention to what remains stable, namely, the core powers and activities by which the species lives and acts.

Set out thus, Oderberg’s claim integrates well with Aquinas’s intentional framework. Antecedent fit explains pedagogical usefulness, not vice versa.Footnote ⁷⁰ For first intentions (e.g., triangle), a wood-knot, for instance, is good when its accidents make the notae conspicuous, facilitating species-formation and truth.Footnote ⁷¹ For second intentions (e.g., the genus ‘animal’), a specimen is good when it renders common content and notes evident.

When we say, for example, that a particular, x, is a good example of triangularity, we are making a double evaluation: (a) in re, x possesses formal features that closely match the notes of the ratio; (b) in intentione, the ratio (and any over-arching second intention that organises it) is functioning well as a cognitive instrument in this case, because x makes those notes especially salient, thereby facilitating adaequatio.Footnote ⁷² The result is that an atypical particular can be a good approximation in Oderberg’s pedagogical sense if it isolates what remains stable when usual accompaniments drop out, thereby bringing a universal close to sense, and making the ratio easier to abstract and the modality of predicates easier to sort. We can now formulate a fourth condition for approximative goodness to the previous three: (iv) where x is an inadequate instance of A, x is approximatively good if its configuration removes or weakens features that normally confuse the ratio, so that the notae belonging to A per se are more readily abstracted.

3. Conclusion

Returning to our opening question, whether Aquinas can vindicate the epistemic goodness of physically deformed individuals without Augustine’s Platonic imaging, we can answer by clarifying a worry that now might be raised. Following Oderberg, final goodness is the goodness a thing has in fulfilling, or at least expressing, what its nature is ordered to be; contributory goodness is the goodness a thing has by enabling or clarifying some further good beyond itself. The worry is that Augustine’s Neoplatonism can treat physical deformity as finally good through an imaging relation grounded in rationes aeternae and seminales, while Thomistic approximation can grant it only a contributory role in sharpening our concepts, and so to risk reducing it to mere instrumentality for cognition. The risk is that we have purchased epistemic value for physical deformity at the cost of it being merely an instrumental value for cognition.

This worry is misplaced once we distinguish kinds of contribution. On a Thomistic reading, what flows from a thing’s nature belongs to its final goodness rather than demoting it to a merely instrumental status.Footnote ⁷³ For example, a bee flourishing according to its nature contributes to the goodness of its hive, and it may contribute to the goodness of the human honey industry. The former adds to the goodness of the hives, which is distinct from the bee. However, because it flows directly from its bee nature, it counts as final goodness. Irregular cases can disrupt spurious correlations that hold only for the most part, and they can force the resolution of a confused universal into a clearer one, improving abstraction and predication. This contributory good perfects the knower, but it presupposes the individual’s final goodness, since only features rooted in the subject can ground the relevant intelligible content.

Applied to approximation, the point whether physical deformity can have intrinsic epistemic value. A physically disabled individual can be good as a path to knowledge when the salient features that clarify a genus or species arise from the individual’s own human nature. On Aquinas’s ontology, accidents and operations that flow from a subject’s substantial form are expressions of that form’s potencies: a bodily deviation is indeed a privation relative to a species-standard, yet the resulting configuration remains a real manifestation of human animal life under limiting conditions. When such a case makes the ratio of a genus or species especially evident, by isolating what is stable amid unusual or diminished traits, it facilitates abstraction and correct predication, moving the intellect towards adaequatio. Although this epistemic benefit perfects the knower, it is not merely external or instrumental. The goodness is contributory because it targets the perfection of the knower; but it presupposes the specimen’s final goodness, since only features rooted in the subject’s nature can properly ground the relevant second intentions.

The conditions (i) to (iv) set out in section two secure the point: approximation is neither a merit detached from a thing’s nature nor a mere pedagogical aid, because its epistemic usefulness depends on traits that proceed from the subject’s own form and potencies. The same traits can count both towards x’s final good (as expressions of its form) and towards the contributory good of cognition.

With these resources, Aquinas can meet the challenge posed in section one. He cannot say, with Augustine, that bodily irregularity images the Divine essence by graded participation in separate Forms; but he can say that (i) every such individual is finally good as an ordered, form-bearing substance within providence’s ordo communis, and (ii) many such individuals are contributorily good as approximations that disclose genus or species content with unusual clarity. Together these claims sustain the evaluative verdict defended in the introduction: apparent deformities neither diminish worth nor unsettle providence. Aquinas reaches that verdict without an intrinsic cosmic imaging metaphysics, by combining the convertibility of being and goodness with a carefully delimited account of approximative, final, and contributory goods.

The paper’s argument has been that Augustine can treat deformity as intelligible within a providential whole through the eternal reasons in the Word, and while Aquinas can secure its dignity by imago and vestigia without adopting an intrinsic cosmic imaging metaphysics, the most plausible Thomistic way to give physical deformity a positive epistemic role is through an Aristotelian account of resolution, where atypical cases aid the clarification of universals. Hence, Aquinas can secure what Augustine secures, epistemic goodness for atypical cases, without separate Forms or a cosmic imaging ontology: each individual is finally good as an ordered, form-bearing substance, and many are also finally good by making their kind’s content more evident.