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St. Thomas invokes the authority of St. Augustine,
who taught that sensible creatures were first produced by
God as intelligible beings in the mind of the angels and
then in the nature of things. St. Augustine came to
this conclusion because of his Platonic philosophy, in
which even our ideas are derived from a supersensible
divine illumination.
St. Thomas shows why this innatism should be admitted in
the case of the angels but not in man. His reasoning:
operation follows being, and the mode of operation follows
the mode of being. But the angel's mode of being is
absolutely immaterial and independent of the body.
Therefore the angel's mode of operation and of
understanding is also without any acceptance from a body;
it is by an intelligible influx from God the author of
nature. On the other hand, the intellective soul would
be united to a body without any reason if the soul did not
obtain its intellective perfection from the
body.[1204] Thus the imagination is the highest
point of the lowest order of sensible knowledge, and our
intellect is the lowest point of the highest order of
intelligence. Hence the adage: the highest of the lower
order touches on the lowest of the higher order, even
though, absolutely speaking, there is a vast difference
between the two. Here we see the subordination of beings
and we conclude that man, a rational animal, is not a
genus but a determined species, in the sense that there
cannot be many species of rational animals. Rational
animal implies the meeting point of the highest in the
lowest order and the lowest in the highest order.
Objection. If from the instant of their creation the
angels receive from God ideas of things, including those
of individuals, the angels naturally know future
contingents, which is against the opinion commonly held.
Reply. Actually these ideas represent only existences
and they are suited to represent futures inasmuch as these
futures are derived from the divine ideas and when they
will be according to the divine will. Even God Himself
does not know from eternity future contingents except as
they are dependent on the decree of His will.
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