#scholastics

Since God is regarded as the cause of corruptibility and of man's captivity to the devil, He must also be regarded as the cause of sin. If the present condition of the body and the soul under the power of death and the devil is of God's making, one is then obliged either to subscribe to predestination and Manichaean dualism or to accept as normal the so-called "natural man's" inclination toward self-centered eudaemonia.

Once the present condition of the psycho-physical man under the power of death and the devil was accepted as natural, the parallel acceptance of mankind's eudaemonistic pursuits as primary and essential in creation was a foregone conclusion. According to this point of view, man is ruled by beneficial desires because God wills it so.

It is startling to discover in the thought of the Scholastics and the West in general the prevailing idea that not only man but God Himself is ruled by a kind of self-seeking love, since God cannot have real love for things outside of the divine essence. To love things outside the divine essence would mean He has need of those things. Consequently, God does not love things outside of the divine essence but loves their beginningless, everlasting, and changeless archetypes within the divine essence.

God has a will, but the object willed is from eternity, an accomplished fact, since the divine essence, divine existence, and divine knowledge are one and the same thing. Any new object of the divine will would indicate a change in the divine essence and prove that God is not eudaemon, perfectly content, since He has need of something new to support and fulfill His eudaemonia.

Ms. Codex 58 - Theologia naturalis

This manuscript features a Latin translation of a Spanish theological and philosophical work attempting to reconcile the natural and supernatural orders of truth, in opposition to the distinction previously made by the Scholastics. The text that appears in printed versions begins after the end of a fairly lengthy prologue. It was written in Germany in 1487 CE.

Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object, and what we might call, though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content, direction towards an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing)... This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We could, therefore, define mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an object intentionally within themselves.