  Some medievals, however, see the Trinity not as providing a counterexample to Aristotle’s thesis that no substance is a relation, but rather as calling our attention to a restriction on its range of applicability.  Aquinas, for example, appears to think that the thesis was specifically formulated to apply only to the case of creatures (cf.  Summa Theologiae I, q. 28, a. 2, corpus), and to some extent this is plausible, since obviously Aristotle was not thinking about theological examples such as the Trinity when he formulated it. Interestingly, however, other philosophers think that the thesis does not hold even in the case of all creatures. Thus, Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154), in a discussion of Boethius’s De hebdomadibus, suggests that creaturely goodness is a relation, indeed, just the relation of being created by God. On this interpretation, moreover, Gilbert takes this relation to be nothing over and above creatures themselves, so that in their case it is individual substances that correspond to the concept ‘created by’ and hence qualify as relations. Like Aquinas, however, Gilbert appears to think of these sorts of cases, not as providing counterexamples to Aristotle’s thesis, but rather as telling us something about the scope of its applicability. According to Gilbert, there is a distinction to be drawn between natural philosophy, which deals with natural things, and other areas of intellectual inquiry, including theology and ethics, which deal with a broader scope of  things.[44]  And Gilbert’s suggestion is that if we restrict our attention to natural philosophy, as no doubt Aristotle did, then like him we will be led to the conclusion that no substance is a  relation.[45]