 This more structured view was already capitalized in the short treatise De triplici ratione cognoscendi Deum (On the Threefold Way of Knowing God), dedicated to William Paleologus in 1516, but published only in 1529, in a version somewhat expanded by Agrippa before printing. The term ratio had many meanings for Agrippa. Firstly, it recounted the ‘way’ of divine revelation. To manifest himself to mankind, God wrote three books, by which the three different religious cultures were able to know him. Ancient philosophers, reading the book of nature, knew God through the created world; Hebrew theologians, reading the book of the law, knew God through the angels and the prophets; Christians, reading the book of the Gospel, gained perfect knowledge of God through his son, made man. Secondly, ratio referred to the three “steps” (gradus) in the spiritual ascent of every human soul to God: sense perception, rational knowledge, and spiritual knowledge. Finally, like the scholastics, Agrippa intended ratio as the epistemological criterion by which philosophical schools performed their theological investigations and reached their understanding of God’s essence.