 Marinella, following this tradition, distinguishes the “efficient or productive cause” from the material cause in the production of every creature, among which she includes woman, and man. On her view, all created things (for example, all angels, heavenly bodies, people, elements—earth, water, fire and air—and animals) ultimately have the same productive or efficient cause, namely God. With respect to the efficient cause, then, created things differ not at all. But there are distinctions in worth among created kinds (and also among individuals, insofar as the causes of two individuals of the same kind might differ), and these distinctions are a function of the differences in the ideas of God, whom Marinella compares to an architect or painter, who effects the production of buildings or art-works through the formulation of an idea or plan. The ideas are the formal causes, which, as we have seen, are the principles of organization that bestow on the individual substance both its form and its function; these produce the different kinds of creatures, and the differences among individuals within a kind. On this account, then, God’s creative process resembles the production of artifacts: in the same way that the painter will have better and worse ideas (in the sense that the ideas for the paintings will be ideas of better and worse things), so too God will have ideas of better and worse things that he brings into being: what God creates is not of uniform value. (The conception of ‘ideas’ here, while clearly Platonic in origin, parallels Aristotelian formal causes.)