Physical Defects and Divine Order: Augustine, Aquinas, and Approximative Goodness

Abstract This article argues for a possible route by which Thomism might affirm the goodness of physical deformity as an aid to abstraction. Recent scholarship has shown how Aquinas can speak positively of bodily diversity as part of God’s providential order, without treating physical defect as a loss of dignity. I extend this line by asking whether Aquinas can also give physical deformity an intrinsic epistemic role. For Augustine, the cosmos is an intelligible whole ordered by eternal Forms in the Word, mediated by rationes seminales , so that even physical defects remain diminished likenesses of their exemplars and can serve the good of the whole. Aquinas rejects this strong Platonic imaging: he retains divine ideas as extrinsic measures determined by God’s will, treats cosmic unity as an ordo communis under providence, and identifies goodness with the actualisation of natural potency. I therefore locate physical deformity as a mixed case of David Oderberg’s notion of ‘goodness by approximation’. The paper states conditions under which a mixed case can clarify a ratio and sharpen the universal: intelligible species are entia rationis grounded in substantial similarity, and atypical cases can remove misleading accompaniments so that what belongs per se becomes more evident.