Some of them are old, such as “theology.” Plato coins theologia [θεоλоγία] to refer to the way in which the gods should be spoken of, one more dignified than what is later called “mythology” ( Republic II, 379a ). The word “theology” keeps that meaning for a long time, as found in Pascal: “The poets made a hundred different theologies” ( Pensées, Br. 613 ). In Latin Augustine uses the word in his polemic with Varro to mean a philosophical doctrine concerning the divine, and he explains it as ratio sive sermo de divinitate, “reasoning or discourse concerning divinity” ( City of God, VIII, 1 ). For Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, the word also refers to the essence of God in himself, in his tripartite nature, as opposed to the benevolent action of God in human history ( oikonomia [оἰϰονομία], see OIKONOMIA ). John Scotus Erigena translates Dionysius’s Greek into Latin in Divine names, I, 15 ( PL, v. 122, col. 463 b ): theologia becomes divinae essentiae investigatio; II, 30 ( col. 599b ): divinae naturae speculatio; then III, 29 ( col. 705b ): “[investigat] quid de una omnium causa, quae Deus est, pie debeat aestimari [it seeks what should piously be conjectured of the unique cause of everything, which is God].” The word appears in its modern sense in Abelard around 1120, as the title of his Theology, named after its opening words, Summi boni. It finally becomes established in Thomas Aquinas, as referring to a science.