Read Concerning Being And Essence Online

xviii PREFACE 

enhanced by this attention to logic, allowing him to direct his 
energy immediately upon the architectonic reform of doctrine. 
Mythological cosmology, the "royal lies" of Plato, were to be 
measured by a program for scientific knowledge the basic 
propositions of which could be about things of nature. 

Theology studies the supernatural order of existence as re- 
vealed in the word of God, whereas philosophy examines the 
natural order as comprehended by reason. Reason demonstrates 
the grounds of credibility for faith, and does so by adducing 
evidence from the natural order. Thus it moves from the better 
known to the less known. In the genetic order of knowing, the 
better known passes from natures to sensible species to uni- 
versals, whereas in the order of intellect there is a reverse 
movement from universals to sensible species to natures. The 
former is the order of abstraction, the latter the order of 
signification. This implies that knowing begins with the con- 
crete substantial unity, or thing, and advances in the order of 
abstraction by a series of steps to a grasp of those entities 
which are univocal signs of one in many, namely, universals. 
Beyond these it infers to simple substances constituted of 
essence and existence rather than of matter and form like con- 
crete entities. There is a continuous order of grades of being, 
each grade possessing its proper operation and hence its proper 
difference and perfection, from natural entities, through quasi- 
material entities (man), to immaterial entities (angels), to 
God as pure act, one and unique. 

Such a graded ordination entails an order of knowing in 
which by shifts from one mode of apprehension to another the 
intellect passes from the literal to the figurative by analogy, 
namely, from modes of signation, to modes of attribution, to 
modes of proportion. The modes of the figurative are super- 
imposed upon the literal by isomorphic relationships or