ABSTRACT
This chapter reveals that rationalist epistemology stems from a combination of Platonic notions of ideas with Aristotelian metaphysics, as it is personified in the Jesuit Francisco Suárez. Nevertheless this will be only a byproduct of our study; for its major aim is to understand that the Jesuit mediated between the two major strains of sixteenth-century philosophical theology, namely, medieval scholasticism and Neoplatonism of the Renaissance. In his Metaphysics, Suárez deals explicitly with God first as the cause before proving his existence. Metaphysics treats God in two ways, namely, as First Cause and as first being. God's ideas are not idle; they are, rather, creativity and createdness as such on the highest level of abstraction. Furthermore, Suárez's approach opens the option to think of finite things in the framework of being created by God. The ideas are the principles-of-coming-to-be of finite things, and at the same time ideas are concepts of creation and thus epistemological principles for conceiving of finite things.
