Pico puts Forms in Angelic Mind / Aquinas in Divine Mind

Pico's philosophical account of Angelic Mind ostensibly explores a Neoplatonist approach, but he is just as clear as Dionysius and Aquinas were in their own respective encounters with Platonism, concerned to block off the door to many gods (Boland). Thinking of the Angelic Mind as a single, simple creature rather than a henadic manifold or plurality of angelic intelligences allows him to make this Christian point clearly, but in a surprising new way. Pico still holds that God does not create the universe in an indirect way through intermediaries—the intermediaries being necessary for another reason than demiurgically taking over for God in the work of creation—but he puts the Forms of all things into the Angelic Mind. This is a different approach from Aquinas, who puts the forms in the divine mind. Understanding what Pico is doing with Forms, Angelic Mind, seemingly in response to theories like that of Aquinas on Divine Mind, is beyond the scope of this small paper but should be pursued in future scholarship.

Doolan on Aquinas' Divine Mind

Thomas notes that a solution must be found that (1) does not introduce a multiplicity into the divine essence, (2) does not add anything accidental to God, or (3) does not posit ideas subsisting outside of the divine mind

Wippel "the plurality of divine ideas joins with the ontological unity of the divine essence to form two essential parts of Thomas' effort to account for the derivation of many (creatures) from the one (their divine source) Divine Ideas 19-20

82 Now the Platonists say that although God created only one creature, the First Mind, nevertheless in effect He created all creatures, for in that First Mind, He created the Ideas or Forms of all things. For in that Mind is the Idea of the sun, the Idea of the moon, of men, of all the animals, of the plants, of the stones, of the elements, and of everything in the world. And since the Idea of the sun is a truer sun than the visible sun is, and so on with all of the other things in world, it follows not only that God created all things, but also that he created them in the truest and most perfect kind of being they can have, that is, in true, ideal, and intelligible being. For this reason the Platonists call the First Mind the intelligible world.