  In reaction to the early Franciscan doctrine of God as first known (Guibert of Tournai, Bonaventure), Aquinas distinguished between a resolution that leads to what is first and better known in itself (God as the first cause) and a resolution that leads to what is first and better known for us, being in general. In the Summa theologiae, Aquinas even more radically calls the ‘essence of things material’ (quiditas rei materialis) the proper object of the human mind; the point is that man in this life has no knowledge of the essence of immaterial things, which make it impossible that God be known first. Henry of Ghent reinstates the doctrine of God as first known. His theological transformation of the first concepts, i.e. the priority he accords to the divine over the creaturely within the transcendental concepts as such, makes God’s quiddity the first known in natural cognition, only unconsciously and indeterminately conceived. Against both Thomas Aquinas and Henry of Ghent, John Duns Scotus formulated his distribution of the first object of the intellect. He distinguishes three orders of intelligibility, each of which has its own first object: the order of origin, the order of perfection and the order of adequation. The first adequate object of the intellect is commensurate to the intellective power and indicates the scope of human reason. Neither finite (Aquinas: the essence of material things) nor infinite being (Henry of Ghent: God) are the first adequate object of human understanding, but the concept ‘being’ that is indifferent to finite and infinite being and is univocally common to God and  creature.[6]