Disputatio XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino

On the Contingency of Creation and Divine Freedom

Quaeritur

Utrum libertas divina consistat non in arbitrio indifferenti sed in plenitudine rationis, qua Deus necessario vult se ipsum et contingenter manifestat se in creatione; et utrum haec contingentia creationis intellegi possit modalis ratione, ita ut creatio sit necessario possibilis in Deo, licet non necessario actualis.

Whether divine freedom consists not in arbitrary indifference but in the fullness of reason, by which God necessarily wills Himself and contingently manifests Himself in creation; and whether this contingency of creation may be understood modally, such that creation is necessarily possible in God, though not necessarily actual.

Thesis

Divine freedom is the rational plenitude of the necessary Good. God’s will is not arbitrary but coincides with divine wisdom: Deus vult se necessario, alia a se contingenter. Creation is not an irrational possibility but the intelligible unfolding of divine necessity in contingent form.

In modal terms:

• God’s existence: □G.

• Creation’s possibility: □(G → ◊C).

• Creation’s actuality: ◊C ∧ ¬□C.
  Thus, the necessity of possibility in God grounds the possibility of contingency in creation. The Spirit mediates this order, actualizing the possible through love.

Locus Classicus

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3:

“Deus necessario vult se, sed non necessario vult alia a se.”
(“God necessarily wills Himself, but not necessarily the things other than Himself.”)

Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée, §173:

“La liberté divine consiste dans le choix du meilleur.”
(“Divine freedom consists in the choice of the best.”)

C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (1952):

“God created the universe freely, not because He needed it, but because He is love.”

Modal Maxim (S5):

□p → ◊p, and ◊□p → □p.

The theological implication: what is necessarily possible in God is immutably intelligible even if contingently realized.

Explicatio

From the perspective of modal metaphysics, divine freedom can only be conceived as the perfect coincidence of necessity and rationality. The act of creation does not introduce irrational novelty into God but manifests eternally possible forms (rationes aeternae) through the free act of love.

In S5 logic, the following distinctions hold:

1. Divine Necessity (□G): God’s existence and essence are necessary. There is no world in which God does not exist: ¬◊¬G.

2. Necessary Possibility of Creation (□◊C): Because God is necessary, creation is necessarily possible: □(G → ◊C). This expresses the eternal availability of creaturely being within divine reason.

3. Contingent Actuality of Creation (◊C ∧ ¬□C): Creation is possible but not necessary. Its existence is not required by divine nature but freely willed: G → ◊C, not G → □C.

4. Modal Principle (MT): □G → □(∀p (◊p → ◊(G → p))). If God exists necessarily, then every possibility is necessarily possible through Him.

Hence, divine freedom may be defined as the actualization of one among necessarily possible worlds according to the order of divine wisdom and goodness. Creation is contingent not because it lacks sufficient reason, but because its reason is of the mode of love, not necessity.

The freedom of God is not voluntas indifferens—a will suspended among options without reason—but voluntas sapientiae: the necessary self-diffusion of goodness. God could have willed otherwise (◊¬C), but what He does will, He wills wisely (□(G → R(C))).

The creature’s contingency thus arises from the necessity of possibility, the divine act that grounds modal being itself. The Spiritus Intelligentiae mediates between the eternal intelligibility of possibility in God and its temporal realization in the world.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Spinoza holds that if God necessarily exists and acts according to His nature, then everything He does is necessary. The very notion of contingency implies imperfection or external limitation, both impossible in God.

Ob. II. van Inwagen claims that to preserve divine freedom, one must deny any determining reason for God’s act of creation. If God has a reason to create this world rather than another, His act is no longer free but necessitated.

Ob. III. For Kant, the idea of divine freedom as “choice among possible worlds” is anthropomorphic. The notion of modality applies only within phenomena; we cannot ascribe modal distinctions to noumenal divinity.

Ob. IV. Existentialism argues that freedom entails the capacity to act without ground. If divine freedom has a sufficient reason, it ceases to be freedom.

Ob. V. Theological voluntarism argues that God’s will precedes His reason. To say that God wills according to wisdom subordinates will to intellect and thus compromises divine omnipotence.

Responsiones

Ad I. Spinoza confuses necessity of essence with necessity of act. God necessarily exists and knows Himself, but His creative act proceeds freely from wisdom, not from causal compulsion. Necessity in God does not exclude contingency in effects; it grounds it as rationally possible.

Ad II. Freedom does not require absence of reason but rational self-determination. The act of creation is free because it proceeds from perfect knowledge, not from external constraint. To remove reason from freedom is to render it arbitrary and unintelligible.

Ad III. Kant’s epistemic modesty cannot constrain ontology. If divine reality grounds all possibility, then modal categories originate in the divine intellect, not in human cognition. God is the ens modalitatis—the cause of the possible as such.

Ad IV. Existential freedom, detached from reason, is negation, not creativity. True freedom is fecund: it gives being. God’s freedom is plenitude of intelligibility, not indeterminate spontaneity.

Ad V. Divine will and intellect are one act in God. The will is rational and the intellect volitional. To will otherwise than wisdom dictates would be impotence, not omnipotence.

Nota

The modal order of creation is rooted in the divine act itself. The necessity of possibility (□◊C) safeguards both divine aseity and creaturely contingency. God is the ground of all modal truth: possibility, actuality, and necessity are modes of participation in His being.

Creation’s contingency is thus not a failure of reason but its richest expression. It reveals that divine necessity is not sterile self-enclosure but communicative plenitude. In the contingent, the necessary becomes gracious.

Hence, contingency is the modality of divine generosity. The Logos grounds it; the Spirit enacts it; and love interprets it.

Determinatio

1. God necessarily exists: □G.

2. Creation is necessarily possible through God: □(G → ◊C).

3. Creation is contingently actual: ◊C ∧ ¬□C.

4. Divine freedom is the rational actualization of a necessarily possible world:
   □G ∧ ◊C → (□(G → R(C)) ∧ ¬□C).

5. Contingency is not absence of reason but finite manifestation of infinite rationality.

6. The Spirit mediates between modal being and actual creation, so that what is eternally possible becomes temporally real.

7. Therefore, contingency is intelligibility-in-gift, with the world being the rational outpouring of necessary love.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLV: De Bello inter Necessarium et Contingens in Ratione Finita

Having seen that divine freedom is the plenitude of rational necessity and that creation’s contingency arises from the necessity of possibility, we must now consider how this relation appears within the finite intellect.

For the human mind experiences a conflict: it perceives necessity as threat to freedom and contingency as threat to reason. This interior bellum within ratio finita mirrors, in fractured form, the divine harmony of wisdom and will. It is here that metaphysical participation becomes phenomenological struggle.

We therefore proceed to Disputationem XLV: De Bello inter Necessarium et Contingens in Ratione Finita, where it will be asked how finite reason, torn between the poles of necessity and freedom, may find reconciliation through the Logos crucified—the Wisdom in whom all opposites are made one.

Disputatio XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae

On the Necessary Ground of Contingency

Quaeritur

Utrum contingentia creaturarum fundetur non in carentia rationis aut necessitatis, sed in participatione ipsius necessarii; ita ut libertas et contingens non sint privationes intelligibilitatis, sed modi amoris divini in ordine creato.

Whether the contingency of creatures is grounded not in the absence of reason or necessity, but in participation in the necessary itself; such that freedom and contingency are not privations of intelligibility, but modes of divine love in the created order.

Thesis

Contingency does not stand opposed to necessity but proceeds from it as participation. The divine necessity, identical with the fullness of reason and goodness, freely communicates itself in finite forms. Thus, contingency arises not from the lack of sufficient reason, but from the plenitude of it: creation is the contingent manifestation of necessary wisdom. The Spirit of Understanding sustains this relation, making the finite capable of the infinite without collapse so that necessity remains divine, and intelligibly grounded contingency, becomes the mark of love’s generosity.

Locus Classicus

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q.19, a.3:

“Deus necessario vult se, sed non necessario vult alia a se.”
(“God necessarily wills Himself, but not necessarily the things other than Himself.”)

Leibniz, Théodicée, §173:

“La liberté divine consiste dans le choix du meilleur, déterminé par la raison même de son excellence.”
(“Divine freedom consists in the choice of the best, determined by the reason of its own excellence.”)

Spinoza, Ethica I, prop. 33:

“Res nulla contingens est.”
(“Nothing is contingent.”)

Peter van Inwagen, Metaphysics (2009):

“God could have created differently, or not at all; there is no reason why He did one rather than another.”

Explicatio

The metaphysical relation between necessity and contingency defines the very structure of creation.  For Aquinas, God is necessary per essentiam—His existence and goodness are identical—but His creative act is free, for it is not a product of external compulsion, but of the internal sufficiency of love.  For Leibniz, divine freedom is rational: God wills what is best because His intellect and will are one.  For Spinoza, however, necessity consumes contingency: whatever exists follows from the nature of God as a geometrical consequence.

Modernity inherited this trilemma: either determinism without freedom (Spinoza), freedom without reason (voluntarism, van Inwagen), or a reconciliation through participation (Aquinas, Leibniz at his best, and theological realism).

True contingency presupposes a necessary foundation, a will whose necessity is that of wisdom and goodness, not of constraint. To be contingent is to exist from another as from reason and cause, yet without coercion. The creature’s being is thus dependent but not necessitated; it is finite but intelligible.

This insight preserves both divine aseity and created freedom. The world’s contingency expresses not divine arbitrariness but divine generosity; it expresses the self-diffusion of the necessary Good into what might not have been, but which now participates in being and intelligibility through love.

Theologically, the Spiritus Intelligentiae mediates this relation. The Spirit holds together necessity and contingency, preserving intelligibility without determinism, and freedom without absurdity. Thus, what philosophy sought to separate, theology reunites in pneumatological causality: the freedom of God as the overflowing of His necessity.

 Objectiones

Ob. I. Spinoza holds that whatever exists follows necessarily from the divine nature. To posit contingency in God’s act is to posit imperfection. A truly infinite being cannot do otherwise than He does.

Ob. II. We learn from Inwagen that if every act of creation has a sufficient reason, then God could not have refrained from creating that world. The only way to preserve freedom is to allow that God’s creative decision has no determining reason.

Ob. III. Hume argues that contingency and necessity are subjective projections. The claim that the world must have a reason for its structure is a habit of thought, not a feature of being.

Ob. IV. Modern existentialism claims that to ground contingency in necessity is to destroy human freedom. Existence precedes essence. Thus, human contingency is absolute, not participatory.

Ob. V. Theological voluntarism holds that if God must act according to reason, then divine will is not free but constrained by intellect. Freedom must be pure voluntas indifferentiae.

Responsiones

Ad I. Spinoza confuses divine necessity with logical necessity. God’s essence is necessary, but His creative act is free precisely because His necessity is personal and rational, not mechanical. The necessity of the Good overflows without coercion, as light diffuses from its source.

Ad II. Freedom does not require absence of reason but coincidence of reason and will. God’s will is not an arbitrary event but the act of infinite intelligibility. To say God acts without reason is to reduce divine action to caprice.

Ad III. Hume’s empiricism dissolves ontology into psychology. Contingency is not a mere epistemic condition but a mode of being dependent on divine act. The regularity of the world reveals rational foundation, not habitual illusion.

Ad IV. Existentialism mistakes dependence for oppression. To exist contingently from God is not to be determined externally but to be upheld by love. The creature’s freedom is participation in divine rational vitality, not its negation.

Ad V. Voluntarism severs freedom from truth and thereby destroys both. The divine will is not arbitrary because it is identical with divine reason. The highest freedom is not indifference but the unhindered expression of perfect wisdom.

Nota

The paradox of contingency and necessity dissolves only when necessity is conceived not as constraint but as plenitude. The divine will is not forced to create; it creates because it is perfect. Contingency thus becomes the temporal image of divine superabundance: a world that might not have been, yet whose existence reflects eternal reason.

The PSR therefore remains valid within contingency, though in a transposed register. Every contingent effect has its reason, not because it is logically deduced, but because it participates in the intelligibility of divine love. The Spirit holds these together: the necessary as the truth of being, the contingent as its radiance.

Determinatio

1. Necessity and contingency are not opposites but correlative modes: the latter presupposes the former as its ground.

2. Divine necessity is identical with goodness and wisdom; it does not compel but overflows.

3. Created contingency arises from divine necessity as gift, not as exception.

4. Freedom is not irrational spontaneity but participation in rational self-giving.

5. The Spirit mediates necessity and contingency, rendering creation intelligible yet free.

6. Thus, the true ratio sufficientis contingentiae is ordo amoris: the love that necessarily gives and contingently adorns.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino

If contingency rests upon necessary wisdom, then divine freedom must be conceived not as arbitrary choice but as the rational plenitude of love. God’s liberty is neither mechanical nor indifferent but the infinite self-expression of the good.

We must therefore examine how divine necessity and divine freedom coexist without contradiction, how it is that God, who necessarily wills Himself, freely wills creation, and how this act preserves both intelligibility and grace.

Accordingly, we proceed to Disputationem XLIV: De Contingentia Creationis et Libero Arbitrio Divino, in which it will be asked whether divine freedom is grounded in rational plenitude rather than in indeterminate will, and whether creation itself, in all its contingency, is the manifestation of wisdom that cannot but love.

Disputatio XLII: De Principio Sufficientis Rationis et Participatione Intellectus

On the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the Participation of Intellect

Quaeritur

Utrum principium sufficientis rationis sit lex logica universalis tantum, an etiam signum participationis intellectus creati in ratione divina; et utrum negatio huius principii, ut apud van Inwagen et metaphysicos analyticos recentiores, tollat ipsam intelligibilitatem creationis.

Whether the Principle of Sufficient Reason is merely a universal logical law, or also a sign of the created intellect’s participation in divine reason; and whether the denial of this principle, as in Van Inwagen and other contemporary analytic metaphysicians, abolishes the intelligibility of creation itself.

Thesis

The Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) is not a mere regulative maxim of thought but a metaphysical expression of the intellect’s participation in divine intelligibility. In its strong sense, it is the formal imprint of the divine Logos within reason itself for it claims that nothing exists without a reason in God’s wisdom. To deny the PSR is not to defend freedom, but to sunder the bond between intellect and being. The Spirit of Understanding (Spiritus Intelligentiae) is the living mediation through which the created mind, in seeking reasons, reflects the inexhaustible rational plenitude of its Creator.

Locus Classicus

G. W. Leibniz, Monadologie, §§31–32 (1714):

“Aucun fait ne saurait être vrai ou existant, aucune énonciation véritable, sans qu’il y ait une raison suffisante pourquoi il en soit ainsi et non pas autrement.”
(“No fact can be real or existing, no statement true, unless there is a sufficient reason why it should be so and not otherwise.”)

Spinoza, Ethica, I, prop. 11, schol.:

“Deus sive Natura ex sola necessitate suae naturae existit et agit.”
(“God, or Nature, exists and acts solely from the necessity of His own nature.”)

Peter van Inwagen, “The Place of Chance in a World Sustained by God” (1988):

“Not every truth has an explanation. Some things just are, and that is the end of the matter.”

Explicatio

The principium sufficientis rationis has traversed the entire history of metaphysics as both a law of thought and an ontological postulate.  In its strong form (Leibnizian–Spinozist), it affirms that for every fact or existent, there must be a reason why it is so and not otherwise, a reason ultimately grounded in divine necessity.  In its weak form (empiricist–Kantian), it is restricted to the domain of possible experience and accordingly becomes a principle of explanation, not of being.  In its moderate form (Aquinas, Wolff, contemporary metaphysical realism), it expresses the participation of created reason in the divine Logos, without collapsing contingency into necessity.

The denial of the PSR, exemplified by van Inwagen’s defense of “brute facts,” aims to preserve freedom and divine sovereignty by positing the inexplicable as metaphysically possible. Yet such denial undermines the very conditions of intelligibility, for if something is without reason, thought itself loses its foundation. A world containing “brute facts” is one in which the Logos is silent.

Theologically, the PSR expresses the Spirit’s inner witness to divine intelligibility in the act of understanding. The finite mind, in seeking sufficient reasons, manifests its participatio in ratione divina. To reason at all is already to echo the divine act of creation, in which being and meaning coincide.

Thus, the PSR is not merely a formal rule of inference but a metaphysical participation in God’s own self-understanding. Its strength is not coercive but luminous because the created intellect cannot but seek the reason of things, being formed as it is in the image of divine understanding.

Objectiones

Ob. I. The modern empiricism of David Hume and the contemporary naturalists argue that the PSR exceeds empirical warrant. Regularities can be observed, but “reason why” is an anthropomorphic projection; causality is habit, not necessity.

Ob. II. Kant held that the PSR is a principle of the Verstand, valid only within the realm of possible experience. Applied beyond phenomena, it yields antinomies. Hence, it is regulative, not constitutive.

Ob. III. Van Inwagen and other analytic metaphysicians contend that not every truth has an explanation. Some facts are “brute,” including free choices and the existence of God. Requiring a reason for everything annihilates freedom and reduces reality to mechanism.

Ob. IV. Sartre and Camus view the absence of sufficient reason as the condition of human freedom. The world is absurd, and meaning is not discovered but created by the self.

Ob. V. Certain theological voluntarists hold that God’s will is ultimate reason. To require a reason for the divine will is to subordinate God to rational necessity. Divine freedom transcends reason.

Responsiones

Ad I. Empiricism confuses the order of discovery with the order of being. That some reasons are hidden does not imply that none exist. The PSR concerns the intelligible ground of reality, not the limits of observation. Hume’s skepticism dissolves not causality but confidence in reason itself.

Ad II. Kant rightly confines the PSR within the phenomenal for critical purposes, but his very act of limitation presupposes its universality. To deny constitutive status to the PSR is already to presuppose that reality conforms to rational form, and this is an implicit metaphysical affirmation.

Ad III. The appeal to “brute facts” is a confession of explanatory despair, not a defense of freedom. Freedom is intelligible only as participation in the divine act of rational self-determination. A choice without reason is not free but arbitrary, and arbitrariness is impotence, not liberty.

Ad IV. Existentialist revolt against reason mistakes alienation for authenticity. The absurd arises not from being but from the will’s refusal to inhabit intelligibility. To assert meaning against the void is still to affirm the PSR implicitly; it is to claim the will to reason in spite of chaos.

Ad V. Divine will is not irrational but supremely rational, identical with divine wisdom. To require no reason beyond God is not to deny the PSR but to fulfill it: Deus est ratio sui. The PSR terminates not in logical deduction but in the subsistent Reason that is God Himself.

Nota

The principium sufficientis rationis stands at the heart of metaphysical realism. In its deepest sense, it is not a law imposed upon being but the trace of divine rationality within it. As the mind seeks sufficient reasons, it participates in the infinite coherence of the Logos. The PSR thus binds ontology and epistemology within the act of the Spirit: it is the metaphysical form of the intellect’s communion with God.

Modern denials of the PSR -- whether they be empiricist, analytic, or existentialist, -- arise from the fragmentation of reason’s participation in the divine. The task of theology is therefore not to reconstruct the PSR as an abstract axiom, but to recognize it as a participation in the eternal Reason by which all things are and are known.

Determinatio

1. The PSR may be distinguished in three senses:

   • Strong (Leibnizian–Spinozist): Every fact has a sufficient reason, grounded in divine necessity.

   • Moderate (Thomistic–Classical Realist): Every contingent being has a reason for its existence in God, but not all reasons are necessitating.

   • Weak (Kantian–Empiricist): The PSR is only a principle of empirical order, regulative for experience.

2. Theology adopts the moderate form: participation without collapse.

   • Contingency is preserved, but reason remains grounded in divine wisdom.

3. The PSR is therefore not merely a rule of logic (ratio cognoscendi), but an ontological participation (ratio essendi) in the divine act of understanding.

4. To deny the PSR is to deny that being is intelligible; and to deny intelligibility is to deny the Logos.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae

The preceding disputation has established that the Principium Sufficientis Rationis is not a mere law of inference but a participation of finite reason in the divine Logos. It thus binds the act of thinking to the act of being and reveals in the search for “why” the trace of eternal Wisdom itself.

Yet the moment the PSR is affirmed ontologically, a tension arises:
If every being has a sufficient reason, is there room for contingency? Must all that is be necessary, as Spinoza contended, or can the contingent subsist within the sphere of intelligibility without dissolving into determinism?

The theological task is to interpret contingency not as absence of reason but as mode of reason, as a form of divine intelligibility expressed as finite freedom. For in creation, necessity does not abolish contingency but gives it foundation; and the contingent, rightly understood, is not the irrational remainder of the divine but the radiant overflow of divine plenitude.

We therefore advance to Disputationem XLIII: De Necessario Fundamento Contingentiae, in which it will be asked whether contingency is grounded not in the negation of necessity but in its participation, so that the freedom of creatures is the temporal and finite reflection of divine rational love.

Disputatio XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae

On the Teleological Judgment and the End of Nature

Quaeritur

Utrum iudicium teleologicum, quo mens naturam tamquam ad fines suos ordinatam interpretatur, sit mera reflectio regulativa humanæ rationis, an potius signum objectivum intelligibilis ordinis in ipsa natura, ita ut in eo praenuntiata sit ratio divina, quæ creaturam ad suam perfectionem dirigit.

Whether the teleological judgment, by which the mind interprets nature as ordered toward ends, is merely a regulative reflection of human reason, or rather an objective sign of an intelligible order within nature itself, such that in it is prefigured the divine reason which directs creation toward its perfection.

Thesis

The teleological judgment (teleologisches Urteil) in Kant’s Critique of Judgment expresses reason’s demand to view organized beings and the totality of nature “as if” they were purposively ordered. Though for Kant this demand is regulative, not constitutive, it nonetheless reveals a deep structure of intelligibility in which efficient and final causality converge. Theology may recognize in this reflective unity the vestige of divine wisdom—the Logos—wherein all things receive both their form and their end. The purposiveness discerned by reason is thus the temporal shadow of eternal intentionality.

Locus classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §65 (AA V: 370–371):

“Ein organisirtes Product der Natur ist das, in welchem alles sowohl Zweck als Mittel ist. … Ein solches Product der Natur, wenn es einmal als Naturzweck betrachtet wird, giebt uns zuerst eine Idee von der Natur als einem System nach der Regel der Zwecke.”

“An organized product of nature is one in which everything is at once end and means. … Such a product of nature, once considered as a natural end, gives us for the first time an idea of nature as a system according to the rule of purposes.”

and §67 (AA V: 377):

“Die teleologische Beurtheilung der Natur nach der Analogie mit der Causalität durch Zwecke ist also nur ein Princip der reflectirenden Urtheilskraft, zum Behuf der Vernunft, die Erfahrung nach einem allgemeinen Gesetze zu systematisiren.”

“The teleological judging of nature by analogy with the causality through ends is therefore only a principle of the reflecting power of judgment, for the sake of reason, to systematize experience according to a universal law.”

Explicatio

In the Critique of Judgment, the teleological judgment follows the aesthetic as a higher mode of reflective reasoning. Whereas the judgment of taste feels purposiveness without a concept, the teleological judgment thinks purposiveness in the organization of nature. It is the intellect’s recognition that mechanical explanation alone cannot exhaust the phenomena of life.

Kant argues that certain natural entities, e.g., plants, animals, ecosystems, exhibit a reciprocal structure, for each part exists for the sake of the whole, and the whole sustains the parts. Such entities are Naturzwecke (natural ends). Though he forbids positing real teleology within nature, Kant insists that our reason must judge as if teleology were present, for otherwise the coherence of experience collapses. The teleological judgment thus functions as a transcendental condition of intelligibility, an indispensable heuristic by which nature appears as system rather than chaos.

Philosophically, this means that reason is not satisfied with mechanism. It yearns for meaning, for finality beyond blind efficient causes. The mind’s very structure inclines it to interpret nature as purposive, because the intellect itself, by seeking completion in understanding, is teleological. Kant therefore interprets teleological reflection as the expression of reason’s moral vocation within nature: the world must be seen as suitable to the realization of moral ends.

Theologically, this “as if” points beyond itself, for the necessity of viewing nature as purposive implies an ontological depth in which purposiveness is not mere projection but participation. The ordered interrelation of beings, the mutuality of part and whole, mirrors the rational and creative intentionality of the Logos. The teleologisches Urteil is the creaturely echo of divine wisdom organizing the cosmos ad gloriam Dei. In discerning purposes, reason encounters the world as symbolic of its Creator, the vestigium Providentiae.

The teleological judgment therefore bridges the aesthetic delight in beauty and the moral demand of freedom. It reveals that nature’s form is already ordered toward good, that contingency itself is enfolded in intelligible purpose. The unity Kant leaves indeterminate, theology identifies with the Logos, with the living reason by whom all things are made and toward whom they move.

Objectiones

Ob. I. The critical purist reminds us that Kant himself insists that teleology in nature is merely regulativ and cannot be regarded as constitutiv. To ascribe objective purposiveness is to transgress the limits of possible experience and reintroduce dogmatic metaphysics.

Ob. II. The mechanistic naturalist opines that modern science explains biological organization by physical law, evolution, and chance variation. Teleology is an anthropomorphic metaphor, and thus is not a real feature of nature. The world needs no purpose to be intelligible.

Ob. III. Materialist reductionism supposes that ends are illusions arising from human projection. Since nature’s apparent order is the byproduct of efficient causes and selection, any appeal to purpose is explanatory redundancy.

Ob. IV. Dialectical theology argues that finding divine purposiveness in nature blurs the radical discontinuity between revelation and creation. Providence is not readable from the world but declared in Christ alone. Natural teleology threatens the primacy of grace.

Responsiones

Ad I. Kant’s restriction is methodological, not ontological. To say that teleology is regulative is to confess that reason cannot demonstrate it, not that it is false. The regulative necessity of purposive thinking implies that intelligibility itself is purposive. Theology interprets this necessity not as proof but as participation, for the finite intellect it attuned to divine wisdom.

Ad II. Mechanism describes how, not why. Laws of physics account for regularity but not for the meaningful order those laws presuppose. The intelligibility of evolution itself depends upon an order of possibility that exceeds mere chance. Teleology need not contradict science. Rather it names the deeper rationality that science presupposes.

Ad III. If ends were mere projections, reason would deceive itself at its very core. Yet the human intellect’s drive to seek ends is inherent, not arbitrary. This drive reflects the structure of being itself as intelligible and goal-directed. The presence of purposiveness in thought signifies a correspondence with real finality in creation.

Ad IV. True, revelation consummates what nature intimates. Yet the Logos through whom all things are created is also the Word made flesh. The teleological order of nature is not a rival to grace but its foundation; it is the praeparatio evangelica of the world. Nature’s purposiveness is the created form of divine intentionality that revelation fulfills in Christ.

Nota

The teleological judgment occupies the middle ground between beauty and morality, between the grace of form and the demand of freedom. In the aesthetic, purposiveness is felt; in the teleological, it is conceived; in the moral, it is willed. Kant thereby restores final causality to philosophical dignity, albeit under the sign of reflection.

For theology, this marks the point where philosophy unknowingly touches creation’s inner logic. The world’s intelligibility is not accidental but the signature of divine intention. Every natural end is a finite parable of the ultimate end, a participation in the divine life. The teleological judgment thus prepares the intellect to recognize creation not as mechanism but as ordo amoris, an ordered love reflecting the eternal reason of the Logos.

Determinatio

1. The teleological judgment expresses reason’s necessity to interpret nature as a system of ends.

2. Though regulative for Kant, this necessity implies real participation of created reason in divine reason.

3. In nature’s teleology there appears the trace of Providence, the Logos himself, wherein efficient and final cause coincide.

4. Teleology is the middle path between aesthetic and moral cognition, preparing the intellect to recognize the unity of nature and freedom in the supersensible foundation.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXXIX: De Iudicio Reflectente

If teleological judgment teaches reason to think unity within nature’s manifold purposes, the next step is to inquire into the very power that makes such unification possible. The mind not only discerns purposes but gathers them into an intelligible whole. This reflectierende Urteilskraft—the reflecting power of judgment—mediates between the understanding that legislates laws and the reason that seeks their unity.

Therefore we proceed to Disputationem XXXIX: De Iudicio Reflectente, wherein it shall be asked how the reflecting judgment serves as the image and echo of the divine intellect, gathering the manifold of experience into a unity that anticipates the Logos Himself, in whom all relations of form and finality find their consummation.

Disputatio XXXVII: De Iudicio Aesthetico et Pulchritudine Mundi

On the Aesthetic Judgment and the Beauty of the World

Quaeritur

Utrum iudicium aestheticum, quod Kant describit ut Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck, id est “purposiveness without purpose,” possit intellegi non tantum ut motus subiectivus delectationis, sed etiam ut indicium transcendentalis concordiae inter sensum et intellectum, ita ut in ipso sensibili appareat vestigium formae divinae, quae est principium omnis pulchritudinis creaturae.

Whether the aesthetic judgment, which Kant describes as “purposiveness without purpose,” may be understood not merely as a subjective feeling of pleasure but as an indication of the transcendental harmony between sense and intellect, such that within the sensible there appears a trace of the divine form, the principle of all creaturely beauty.

Thesis

The aesthetic judgment is the experience in which reason is reconciled with sense without the mediation of a concept, revealing an inner accord of faculties otherwise dissonant in ordinary cognition. In this gratuitous harmony, which seeks nothing beyond its own consonance, the intellect touches the trace of divine order. The beauty of the world, though a sensible experience, is an analogy of divine form, a prelude to theology in which the creature manifests the grace of its being.

Locus classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §§1–22 (AA V: 204–231):

“Das Schöne ist das, was ohne Begriff als Gegenstand eines notwendigen Wohlgefallens erkannt wird.”
The beautiful is that which, without a concept, is apprehended as the object of a necessary delight.

and §9 (AA V: 220):

“Zweckmäßigkeit ohne Zweck.”
Purposiveness without purpose.

In these early sections Kant defines the beautiful as that which elicits a feeling of purposive harmony between imagination and understanding, though this harmony cannot be determined conceptually. The judgment of taste thus mediates between the deterministic order of nature and the autonomy of freedom.

Explicatio

Kant’s Critique of Judgment begins with the analysis of aesthetic experience as a phenomenon that unites sensibility and reason without subsuming one to the other. In the judgment of taste, the mind finds itself in a free play. The imagination and understanding correspond spontaneously, producing a feeling of delight that is both individual and universally communicable.

This “purposiveness without purpose” expresses a peculiar transcendental structure. It reveals that the world, as it appears, is not alien to the human faculties of knowledge but proportioned to them as if designed for their accord. The necessity of the aesthetic pleasure, that is that everyone ought to find this beautiful, signals a claim to universal validity that exceeds private emotion.

The aesthetic judgment therefore discloses, though it cannot prove, a transcendental harmony between mind and world. It mediates between the mechanical lawfulness of the first Critique and the moral autonomy of the second, pointing toward a unity that will later demand the supersensible substrate. Beauty thus inaugurates the movement from mere cognition to the awareness of meaning within being.

Theologically interpreted, this experience bears ontological weight. The sensus pulchri is the creature’s pre-conceptual participation in the Logos. In the aesthetic delight that arises from proportion, radiance, and integrity, the human spirit experiences the trace of the divine wisdom through which all things are ordered. The harmony between imagination and understanding mirrors, on a finite plane, the eternal correspondence between divine intellect and created form.

Hence, beauty is not accidental ornamentation but manifestation. It is the appearance of order as grace, the epiphany of being’s intelligibility in sensuous form. The delight of the beautiful is thus the affective echo of divine affirmation: “and behold, it was very good.”

From this point of view, aesthetic judgment is not antithetical to theology but preparatory for it. It establishes the possibility of revelation through form. The same Logos who gives moral law and rational order also shines forth in the splendor of form. What Kant calls the free harmony of the faculties may therefore be seen as the creaturely reflection of that intra-divine harmony through which form, end, and delight coincide in God.

Objectiones

Ob. I. Empiricism argues that beauty is a sensory affection, and that the universality of aesthetic judgment is a fiction of communication, not a property of the object. No knowledge lies in delight.

Ob. II. Critical formalism claims that Kant himself denies that the aesthetic judgment can teach anything about God or the ends of nature. It is only a mode of reflection on our faculties, not a revelation of transcendental things.

Ob. III. The theology of the cross teaches that God is revealed in deformity and suffering, not in beauty. Beauty is the glory of the creature, but God hides beneath its opposite.

Ob. IV. Existentialism avers that beauty reveals nothing; it is an affective compensation for the absurdity of existence, not a vision of divine order.

Responsiones

Ad I. The feeling of beauty involves a claim to universal assent, and this claim transcends the private. Such universality without concept implies an objective ground of harmony between the faculties and the world. Even if empirical verification is impossible, the structure of the judgment presupposes a common rational order, an analogical participation in intelligible form.

Ad II. While Kant forbids metaphysical inference, he admits transcendental signification. The aesthetic judgment intimates the purposiveness of nature without defining its cause. Theology, interpreting this sign as vestigium sapientiae divinae, does not overstep critique but fulfills its openness. The “as if” of purposiveness becomes the “because” of creation.

Ad III. The cross does not abolish form but reveals its transfiguration. In Christ crucified, beauty and horror coincide; the pulchritudo crucis is beauty reconciled to truth. Thus, the theology of the cross deepens aesthetics: it discloses that true form is not symmetry alone but the radiance of love that gives itself.

Ad IV. Existential alienation misreads delight as flight. Yet the very capacity to perceive beauty amid suffering testifies to a transcendent order sustaining existence. Aesthetic joy is not escape but participation; it is the creature’s resonance with the intelligible goodness that grounds being against nothingness.

Nota

The aesthetic judgment marks the first recovery, after modernity’s fragmentation, of a holistic vision of reason and sense. Where the first Critique disjoined knowing from being, feeling here restores their secret unity. Beauty becomes the threshold by which epistemology turns toward ontology.

For theology, this signifies that revelation does not first occur in propositions but in splendor, in the radiance of form that draws the mind toward its source. In the delight of the beautiful, the soul anticipates participation: forma becomes praeambulum gratiae.

Determinatio

1. Aesthetic judgment is a harmony of the transcendental faculties; it is a sign of the concordance between reason and the world. 

2. Beauty, in so far as it is sensible, is an analogy of the divine form in which the intellect and sense are joined together. 

3. Delight in beauty is a pre-conceptual participation in the Logos, who is both form and finality of creation.

4. Aesthetics therefore prepares for teleology; feeling gives way to reflection, and purposiveness felt becomes purposiveness thought.

Transitus ad Disputationem XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae

If in beauty the soul feels purposiveness without purpose, in teleology the intellect thinks purposiveness with an end implied. Aesthetic harmony awakens a sense of design; teleological reflection interprets that design as order.

Therefore, we advance to Disputatio XXXVIII: De Iudicio Teleologico et Fine Naturae, wherein it will be asked how the reflective reason, moving from the experience of beauty, comes to posit purposiveness as a principle of nature itself, and how this transition anticipates the theological doctrine of creation ordered toward the glory of God.

Disputatio XL: De Substrato Supersensibili et Fundamentis Finalitatis

On the Supersensible Substrate and the Foundations of Finality

Quaeritur

Utrum notio Kantiana de substrato supersensibili, quod naturae et libertatis communis est, possit intellegi non solum transcendentaliter sed etiam ontologice, ita ut idem substratum theologice referatur ad Logos, in quo omnis finalitas creaturarum fundatur.

Whether Kant’s notion of a supersensible substrate, common to nature and freedom, may be understood not merely transcendently but ontologically, as the Logos in whom all creaturely purposiveness is grounded.

Thesis

The übersinnliches Substrat in Kant’s Critique of Judgment functions as the unifying ground that reconciles the realms of nature and freedom. While for Kant it remains an indeterminate concept, accessible only as a limiting idea, theology may recognize in it the ontological trace of the Logos—the living unity in which intelligibility, causality, and purposiveness converge. It is thus the hidden depth of divine reason through which all finality in creation derives its coherence.

Locus Classicus

Kritik der Urteilskraft, §57 (AA V:195–196):

“Es muß also ein gemeinschaftliches, aber uns unbekanntes, Substrat, dem sowohl der Natur, als dem Freiheitsgesetze gemäß, zum Grunde liegen, mithin die Möglichkeit der Einheit des Übersinnlichen, welches unter beiden liegt, sein.”

“There must therefore lie at the basis of both nature and the law of freedom a common, though to us unknown, substrate; hence there must be the possibility of a unity of the supersensible that underlies both.”

and §59 (AA V:198):

“Die Vernunft kann sich diese Übereinstimmung des Zweckmäßigen in der Natur mit demjenigen in der Freiheit gar nicht anders denken, als daß beide einer gemeinschaftlichen, aber uns unbekannten obersten Ursache, dem Übersinnlichen, angehören.”

“Reason can think this accord of what is purposive in nature with that in freedom in no other way than that both belong to a common, though to us unknown, highest cause—the supersensible.”

In these passages, Kant articulates the transcendental postulate that there must exist a common supersensible foundation underlying the two heterogeneous orders of experience, nature (necessity) and freedom (morality), even though reason cannot determine its nature conceptually.

Explicatio

The Critique of Judgment culminates in the discovery of a hidden unity that underlies the dualisms of Kant’s earlier critiques. Nature, governed by mechanical causality, and freedom, ruled by moral law, require a common ground if human reason is to see the world as one intelligible system. This ground is not empirical but supersensible; it is that which cannot appear within phenomena yet makes the unity of appearances and moral law possible.

For Kant, this übersinnliches Substrat is a necessary postulate of reason: it is the “unknown ground” (unbekanntes Substrat) in which the natural and moral orders share participation. It guarantees the possibility that the world of sense can be adequate to the purposes of reason, that creation as we know it can serve as a theater for the realization of moral ends.

Philosophically, this substrate is the transcendental condition of finality, the point of coincidence between efficient and final causality. It explains why the reflective judgment may legitimately interpret nature as if ordered toward ends. For, after all, such order is not accidental but rooted in a unity beyond the distinction of mechanism and teleology.

Theologically, this unity discloses the deep structure of participation. The supersensible substrate is the point at which creation remains held in being by the eternal Word. The Logos functions as the ens commune intelligibile, the "common intelligible being," the ontological depth in which form, purpose, and act coincide. What Kant calls “supersensible” is precisely what theology calls divine wisdom as immanent cause. It is the living intelligibility through which the world is not merely caused but constituted.

In the first Critique, reason was divided against itself; in the second, it sought its own autonomy. In the third, however, it begins to glimpse its unity in a common foundation. Kant’s “unknown cause” becomes, for theology, the known mystery, the Logos as the ground of both natural order and moral law.

Thus, the übersinnliches Substrat is not a sterile limit but a sign of participation. It is the horizon where finite being opens upon its divine origin. Just as the reflectierende Urteilskraft gathers the manifold into unity, so the supersensible substrate grounds that unity ontologically. It is the “gathering depth” of the Logos, the point at which all created teleology returns to its source and finds its coherence.

Objectiones

Ob. I. For the early Kant, the supersensible substrate is a Grenzbegriff, a boundary concept, introduced only to regulate thought. It carries no positive ontological content. To identify it with the Logos transgresses the limits of reason and collapses critique into dogmatism.

Ob. II. Naturalistic mechanism holds that teleology is a heuristic projection, and thus there is no need for a supersensible substrate. The unity of nature is explicable by physical law and probabilistic regularity, not by appeal to metaphysical grounds.

Ob. III. Atheistic existentialism supposes that Kant’s supersensible substrate is an empty abstraction masking human alienation. It does not unite nature and freedom but hides their disjunction under an illusion of harmony. To theologize it is to sanctify alienation.

Ob. IV. Dialectical theology declares that any “common ground” of nature and freedom undermines the radical distinction between Creator and creature. Revelation admits no shared substrate; God’s transcendence excludes ontological mediation.

Responsiones

Ad I. The limitation of reason to regulative use does not annul the ontological implication of its postulates. Kant’s Grenzbegriff marks the boundary not of being but of conceptual knowledge. The postulation of a unity beyond phenomena already implies its real possibility. Theology interprets this not as speculative knowledge but as metaphysical participation. It is the intellect’s recognition that its own act of synthesis is grounded in divine unity.

Ad II. Mechanism describes order but cannot account for its necessity. Physical law presupposes the very rationality it explains. The coherence of empirical causality and moral teleology cannot itself be causal; it requires a ground transcending both. The supersensible substrate expresses the logical necessity of an intelligible order that precedes empirical description.

Ad III. The accusation of abstraction misunderstands Kant’s intention. The supersensible substrate does not mask alienation but names the condition of possibility for overcoming it. It points to a unity that cannot yet be possessed but that nonetheless draws the finite toward reconciliation—a yearning that theology names participatio in Verbo.

Ad IV. The Creator–creature distinction remains intact. The supersensible substrate does not dissolve transcendence but affirms it as the ground of immanence. To say that nature and freedom share a common ground is not to identify them with God, but to confess that both proceed from and depend upon the divine act of creation, in which the Logos sustains their relation.

Nota

Kant’s übersinnliches Substrat is a pivotal moment in the history of reason: the first modern attempt to speak, within critical limits, of an ontological unity beyond empirical and moral dualism. In it, reason confesses— albeit unwittingly—its dependence upon what theology calls divine wisdom. The substratum gathers the scattered orders of necessity and freedom into a single purposive horizon. Accordingly, it is the silent counterpart to the Word through whom all things are made.

Theologically interpreted, this substrate is not a “thing” beyond experience but the presence of intelligibility itself—the immanent trace of God’s creative Logos within the fabric of reality. Where reason perceives an unknowable cause, faith perceives the infinite intelligibility of God acting within and through creation.

Determinatio

1. The übersinnliches Substrat signifies the transcendental unity grounding both the natural and moral orders;. tt is the necessary presupposition of any teleological relation between them.

2. Though Kant presents it as unknowable, its very necessity implies an ontological reality, a divine act of unity prior to all distinction.

3. This ground is best interpreted theologically as the Logos, the living rationality through which all being receives its order and purpose.

4. The supersensible substrate thus expresses in critical terms what theology confesses in creedal form, that all things subsist and cohere in ipso.

5. The human experience of purposiveness is therefore a finite reflection of the eternal finality of the Word, in whom creation and freedom converge.

Transitus ad Disputationem XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis

The supersensible substrate, in which Kant discerned the hidden unity of nature and freedom, marks the highest reach of transcendental reflection. Here, reason approaches its own boundary wherein the unconditioned ground of appearance must be thought, yet cannot itself appear. But what for critical philosophy remains a limit, for theology becomes a threshold: limen revelationis.

For the supersensible is not the negation of the sensible, but its depth. The Logos who grounds all purposiveness does not remain forever concealed behind phenomena. Rather, He gives Himself in appearance, not as an object among others, but as the manifesting of manifestation itself. What the übersinnliches Substrat named in abstraction, phenomenology will seek in concretion: the event of being as appearing.

Thus we pass from the critical postulate of unity to the phenomenological experience of presence. The next disputation therefore asks how being itself comes to light, and how this Erscheinung des Seins may be understood as the self-showing of divine intelligibility.

We proceed, then, to Disputationem XLI: De Phenomenologia et Apparitione Entis, in which it will be examined whether the appearing of being discloses not merely the conditions of experience but the act of the Logos through whom all things are made manifest.