Sacred Demonstrations, or the Christian Euclid, Book II

excluded above the celestial region and in the whole power of nature, no administrator of nature can deny. For before matter, the intellectus intellect exists, capable of becoming all things, conceiving the forms of all things in the archetypo archetype. The motores orbium movers of the spheres and dæmones demons/spirits are admitted as necessary in nature by the Peripatetic and Platonic philosophers, who to me are worth all the rest. The sacred writings hand down angels, demons, and separated souls; but of these, later. It is enough that there is a nature there greater than the heaven. There is no doubt about the heaven; much less about the palpable elements. The celestial natures represent power; the heaven, by whose rotation all things seem to be nourished, refers to the knowledge of all things, as nothing here escapes its action. These things which are in perpetual motion take the place of will and the effect of divine love; and they are effects, and they both are and procreate by the power of the two superior ones, with the first directing and the second moving. For this reason, the initiates of the sacred eloquences call the Holy Spirit the finger of God, by whom things, as if touched by a hand, conceive form. For just as the will and love or affection acts upon a thing immediately when the faculty is present, so through the will of God, which is above time, these effects occur here in time, with forms being impacted upon matter. For although there is a certain dissimilarity due to the difference of matter, the property nevertheless agrees throughout all things. But it will be far clearer in particulars. Since the angelic nature has a free will, it consists of intellect, will, and the joining of both. If, however, that should be called matter and form, some doubt. I will say nothing of the words; one thing is clear: whatever is created, since it does not have existence from itself, must have something in the place of form and something in the place of matter.