overcome by the immanent. This is because, according to Aquinas, God’s
existence can be known, but his essence, what he is, cannot be known.
God is infi nitely greater than creatures. 8 What can be known is his exis-
tence by means of cause and effect. Because the effect (the creature) is not
equal with her cause, God (the essence and the cause) cannot be known.
What can be known is that there is a cause, which is God. Even divine
illumination of the natural intellect is not suffi cient to reveal the essence of
God. 9 This is why knowledge of God by creatures, for Aquinas, cannot be
univocal, but analogical. The Being of God is qualitatively different from
being; being can only be known in relation to Being.
Duns Scotus achieved the fl attening of Being into being through uni-
vocity, reducing God and creation to the common concept of being. “ Esse
threatens to become greater than God and God to be idolatrously reduced
to the status of a partner with his Creation in casual processes.” 10 Without
God as the transcendental category, knowledge became possible through
the now-autonomous category of being. No longer did metaphysics
need theology. 11 One could understand it without God due to a greater,
more “accessible” concept by which to understand it, namely, being. 12
According to this genealogy, the autonomous reason of Cartesian epis-
temology is merely part of the Scotian ontological lineage that confuses
being with Being. 13
Having uncovered this genealogy, RO declares the coming end of
modernity, which is “the end of a single system of truth based on universal
reason, which tells us what reality is like.” 14 RO declares the biasedness
of both religious and secular reason. Behind each rationality is a presup-
position. 15 There is no longer universal, foundationalist systems of ratio-
nality, an uninterpretive view of reality. Reason is never separate from a
particular understanding of reality. Epistemology is not the indubitable,
neutral starting point of knowledge. Rather, an epistemological viewpoint
is based on a particular ontology that shapes the contents, conditions, and
possibilities of knowledge. 16 Secularism, therefore, is exposed as another
confessional, interpreted rationality.
Participatory ontology, RO’s “central theological framework,” 17
regards the world as creation that participates in, or is suspended from,
the Creator. This unbroken link renders secular interpretation of reality
impossible, for there can be no space outside of God in this ontology;
to admit otherwise is to concede a secular space independent of God.
This ontology therefore acts as the epistemological hermeneutical fi lter
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