Scotus Academicus, Tomus quartus: De Angelis

Moses once earnestly besought God to grant him the vision of His divine face, and received from Him this answer: you shall see my back parts, but my face you cannot see: something similar happens to us at present; for we have hitherto expended all our labor in explaining the first book of the Sentences, so that we might be allowed to uncover and behold God as subsisting, operating, and producing within Himself: but the weak and dim-sighted gaze of our mind could neither look up to nor sustain that immense light of the Divinity.

Wherefore, in the manner of Moses, we now descend to the back parts of the Divinity itself, namely, to survey His external Works, that we may behold the splendor of that divine Sun in creatures, as it were refracted and shining forth benignly like a ray in the little droplets of water: the back parts of God are, says the Nazianzen, Orat. 34., those things which came forth after Him, and which declare to us His Divinity.

No differently, indeed, than the shadows and images of the sun in the waters represent the sun to weak eyes; since we cannot gaze upon it directly, as its purity of light surpasses every sense. — Therefore he does not depart from the contemplation of God, nor does he carry out the theologian's task any the less, who searches out and investigates the marvelous works of the Divinity itself; since these bear within themselves the marvelously shining image of God, impressed upon them as in seals, expressed as in mirrors, diffused as in rays, delineated as in an effigy: for the invisible things of God, says the Apostle to the Romans 1., are clearly seen from the creation of the world, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Divinity.

Now the Arbiter and Artificer of all things, God, with just balance and wise nomenclature, weighed out and distinguished all these created works into a threefold order. For the angels, as being altogether spiritual, rightly occupy the summit of creatures: for they are the primary and preeminent outflows of the Divinity, in which God expressed Himself both more clearly and signed Himself more enduringly. Corporeal things, whether living or devoid of life, in which no light of reason and intelligence shines, hold the lowest place; for these merely adumbrate the entity of God, while those glory only in the lowest participation of His life. But Man, placed as it were in the middle between these contending extremes, joins together in himself, by a happy bond, both natures, the spiritual and the corporeal.

For, as the Nazianzen elegantly weighs the matter, Orat. 38.,

The mind already, and the senses, thus distinct from one another, kept themselves within their own bounds: but there was not yet any tempering of the two, or mixture of contraries, which might exhibit a specimen of the loftier Wisdom, and of the variety and excellence exercised about the creation of the natures. When therefore it pleased Him to show this by the artificer's word, He fashions man, one animal from both, that is, from the invisible and the visible nature..... As a kind of other world, great in smallness, He places him on the earth; another angel, a composite worshipper, and a spectator of the visible nature, an initiate of the intellectual; king indeed of those things that are on earth; but subject to those above; earthly and heavenly, transient and immortal, visible and intelligible, midway between greatness and lowliness, the same spirit and flesh, spirit for the sake of grace, flesh to avoid pride.

Since, therefore, the whole of the divine workmanship is integrated and illustrated in these three grades of created beings, namely, of purely spiritual, of purely corporeal, and of those compounded partly of matter and partly of spirit, hence with wise counsel Peter Lombard, and as many as were the eminent Commentators and Interpreters of his work, in ordering the second book of the Sentencies undertake this single aim: that, having explained this threefold order of creatures, they may commend the ineffable power and wisdom of God creating and producing outside Himself.

Although, however — but we shall propose that for discussion in another dissertation. Therefore we shall distribute all those things that are treated in the second book of the Sentences by the Subtle Doctor into three Parts, or Treatises, according to the threefold knowledge to be attained of the creature purely intellectual, namely the Angelic, of the creature purely corporeal, namely the whole Universe, and of the creature partly corporeal, partly spiritual, to wit, the Human.

The first part, therefore, will embrace the excellences and operations of the angels within the order of Nature and Grace; the second will delineate the order and formation of the whole worldly fabrication: the third, indeed, will disclose the marvelous workmanship of man and his varied lot.