AQUINAS AND IMITATION OF NATURE AS A WAY OF MORAL WISDOM

Abstract

The paper focuses on the concept of St. Thomas Aquinas’s concept of the imitation of nature inasmuch as it concerns the seeds of human moral virtues grasped in their terms from the operations of natural things. Aquinas often compares virtues and moral actions to the operations of natural things. He speaks for instance about movement of water towards the center, or an upward movement of fire. Sometimes he mentions animals or parts of the body to explain natural inclinations of the will. In various places he seems to assert that natural things can be considered a trace of and a path to wisdom of a virtuous human life.

This approach to ethics seems to be naturalistic, not however in sense of submitting the order of human actions to the order of natural things, but rather to wisdom itself, of which natural things are only a manifestation. In this account imitation of nature is a way of unfolding principles of wisdom from their natural effects in things, and applying them to a vast range of possible virtuous actions according to the human mode of rational desire.