Select Works, Section 179

Describing the divine only by negation—God transcends all positive categories and concepts; the via negativa.

The text notes that the Firsts cannot be referred to outside Causes, using negation to describe their transcendence.

Narratives or doctrines of cosmic origin — how heaven, earth, and the primordial deities first came into being. The Kojiki's deities born alone on the Plain of High Heaven, Voluspo's Ginnungagap, Genesis's tohu wa-bohu, the Timaeus's Demiurge fashioning the Receptacle, the Hesiodic Theogony, the Kalevala's egg-cosmogony, Egyptian Nun-and-Atum. Distinct from emanation_hierarchy (structural-ontological cascade), letters_of_creation (mechanism of creation), and apocatastasis/frashokereti (end-state restoration); cosmogony is temporally-narrative beginning.

The passage engages with the origin of cosmic order by rejecting the atomic cosmogony and insisting that order, reasoning, and the governing soul must come from a non-material principle.

Pronoia — the doctrine that the divine actively orders the unfolding of the cosmos and human affairs toward intelligible ends, against pure chance or blind necessity.

[auto] The passage centrally argues against causelessness and chance, asserting that all action requires a motive or initiating power, reflecting an ordered cosmos.

The doctrine that God has no parts, divisions, or composite attributes; pure undivided being.

The passage states that for Eternal Existents, Essence consists precisely in giving forth Act, implying a non-composite unity of being and action.

A chain of divine beings or principles flowing downward from a single transcendent source (the One or the Father), each level less perfect than the one above.

The text describes a structure where 'Firsts' exist without external causes while other entities derive their Being from them, indicating a hierarchical flow.

The divine reason, word, or ordering principle through which the universe was created; mediates between the transcendent God and the material world.

The 'reasoning' and 'governing soul' that the passage insists must order the cosmos, and the 'quite another kind of Principle' for the sphere of mind, function as a rational ordering principle mediating between the transcendent and the material.

The absolutely simple, undivided first principle from which all multiplicity and existence flows.

The 'Firsts' are described as uncaused principles from which dependent entities derive their existence, aligning with the concept of a first principle.