  Typical of the doctrine of the transcendentals of Henry of Ghent († 1293) is his defense of the doctrine of God as first known, which had been elaborated in the Franciscan tradition by Bonaventure and had been rejected by Aquinas. On account of his different understanding of analogy, not treated as a mode of predication as in Aquinas, but as the property of a concept, Henry achieves an integration of the divine names in his doctrine of the transcendentals as the most general aspects of being that recognizes a priority of the divine over the creaturely within the transcendental concepts as such. What has been called Henry’s “new way to God” starts with the acknowledgement that something finite is good and goes on to purify this content of ‘good’ along different degrees of abstraction, in order to reach the infinite realization of this content in God. The claim is that it can only be understood that something finite is good, if the infinite realization of the good is always already implicitly understood (and the same holds for being and the other transcendentals). Naturally, there is a major difference in the epistemic status of the evidence, on the one hand, that being and the other transcendentals are first known objects in the analysis of cognition, and of the evidence, on the other hand, that God is first known, exerting a natural priority within these transcendental concepts as such. Whereas God is absolutely yet indistinctly the first known, ‘being’ is distinctly known first. Another important shift in comparison to Thomas Aquinas lies in Henry’s identification of the concepts of ‘being’ and ‘thing’, i.e. the essentialist interpretation of being. Henry construes his doctrine of the transcendentals, quoting Aquinas, as a series of conceptual additions to being as first known, but disagrees with Aquinas as regards the meaning of the concept of being: it does not signify the actuality of being, but the aspect of essence, for which Aquinas had reserved the term ‘thing’ (res). Although Henry follows Aquinas in his affirmation that only negations and conceptual relations can add something to being without contracting it – he strongly emphasizes the origin of these conceptual additions in the intellect –, he asserts that the ‘negation of negation’ expressed by ‘the one’ as adding the aspect of indivision is something positive.