All metaphysical thinking is done "from within and at the interior of a founding tradition, of an initial given, of a revelation."

"the very difficulty one experiences in tying [(rattacher)] Saint Thomas to a[ny given] philosophical school is in fact the sign that the unity of his thought is assembled [(se noue, tied up)] elsewhere, higher up:  on the properly theological plane.  It was the exigencies proper to the understanding of the Word of God that led Saint Thomas—as already Denys—to transform the philosophical systems available to him [(préexistants)] and above all to innovate [(à créer du neuf)] in an attempt to express the metaphysics immanent to the datum revealed."

     Serge-Thomas Bonino, "Influence du Pseudo-Denys sur la conception thomiste de l'«esse»," Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 94, no. 3 (1993):  272 (269-274).

All metaphysical thinking is done "from within and at the interior of a founding tradition, of an initial given, of a revelation.  Not that the tradition as such delivers a philosophy ready-made, immune to the vicissitudes of history, but [that] it is pregnant with an irrepressible [(fontale)] intelligibility that, however, it is fitting to re-enunciate in the mode proper to rational thought" (273).